Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It is so dark . . .

Briefly, they wonder if they have gone blind. The pitch black that surrounds them is so suffocating, they wonder if– perhaps, somehow, they have been cast into the unappeasable maws of ginnung; a black hole, where no stars and no suns could ever hope to reach. A pit where every last comet and planet and nebula comes to die. No sound, no life - they are completely and utterly alone in this void.

“Blood . . .”

There comes a voice, so far away and muffled as it is. As if they are separated by some vast ocean, with no sight of land on the other side. No sight of each other. They don’t immediately recognize the voice, but something in their waterlogged brain tells them that they should have.

There is a great anxiety that accompanies this dull realization.

There is a great pain, also.

Every inch of them is alight with it; an unbearable agony that they have never felt before. And they fear the sudden urge to cry out, lest they open their mouth wide enough for the water to rush in and drown them entirely. Or, perhaps, it would allow ginnung space enough to needle its claws down the length of their throat and steal away what precious little air their lungs still hold fast to.

“Hound!”

The voice, again.

A frantic whisper this time. Or perhaps it is shouting after all, and they simply cannot hear it beneath the vicious waves that threaten to engulf them, that promise to drag them under. It is struggle enough to remember to hold their head above water and breathe.

But– there is no water, and there is no empty vacuum of ginnung. And, with great difficulty, they realize they have not gone blind.

Their eyelids are simply to heavy to lift without some great, conscious effort; weighed down by some force more incumbering than gravity itself. And pain. There is always the echoes of pain, howling back at them in the wake of every thing they do or do not accomplish.

Should they breathe, the pain responds unkindly. Should they hold their breath, the pain does not withhold its answering strike. Their eyes hurt when closed, and they are certain that agony will increase tenfold should they ever manage to get them open again. They have yet to even move– they do not even know where or how or what their body is in existence; whether it is still whole or upright or missing or completely torn asunder.

They only even know their name because this distant and enduring voice seems to.

And despite, motionless as they are, subsisting within their own body is so insufferable, they cannot imagine how it will be once they gather all the pieces of themself together again and will their body into movement once more.

The voice speaks again, but its language is lost on them.

Muffled words drone and melt together into nothing more than a discontented hum. They feel something warm against their face– their cheek?– and a weighted pressure is lifted from where they think their neck might be. The pain swells, brief and blinding, but then quickly settles into something more tolerable. Their head is being held aloft, they think.

Straining themself, they manage to slowly pry open one eye, and then the other; blinking drunkenly and off-synch as their eyes roll around haphazardly within the sockets, trying to take in all of the room at once. The voice becomes a blurred figure standing just before them and it’s still speaking, they can tell, but their brain still fails to take in the sounds and translate them into anything intelligible. It’s nothing more than a low, rumbling purr.

It is comforting, but something in their subconscious says that it shouldn’t be.

The figure– the voice– is built of shades of red.

They attempt a name, but all that comes out is a useless slur of sounds. Their tongue is a sponge soaked in lead; hot, heavy, entirely uncooperative and taking up too much space within their mouth. The world tastes of copper.

Something warm is congealed to the side of their head, to their neck, their torso, to so many parts of themself that they lose track in trying to catalog it all. The throbbing in their shrunken skull becomes more apparent, and their vision remains glossed and impotent; nothing clarifies beyond vague shapes and fuzzy colors.

There might be bodies on the floor, behind the figure speaking to them. They cannot tell.

The walls are slate grey and possibly windowless.

There are things, objects and furniture, in this cavernous room. They do not know what any of them are.

Where they are, how they got here, they cannot say; they can barely remember who they are, let alone anything that happened before the darkness.

The figure before them kneels and begins to do something at their back, reaching around them to undo something they cannot see. Their arms scream in agony, and they think they hear themself let out a muffled cry.

“I know,” the voice says, patronizing in its sympathy, and they understand.

It soothes them, inexplicably.

When they try to speak again, their tongue still refutes cooperation, the words are drowned, and the world still tastes of copper.

“Quit,” the voice tempers them, “before you rip your whole mouth apart.”

Understanding evades them.

They cannot begin to question why, or attempt to hunt down the meaning themself. Their world is upheaved– they are upheaved; lifted so preciously by living steel. Pain blinds them with the movement, sending them careening briefly back into ginnung's suffocating maw. The voice coos its understanding but offers no apology. When their foggy sight returns to them, it is a brief thing:

“Relax,” the voice commands, and something like a cloth is draped delicately over their head, shrouding them in a kinder darkness– not ginnung's mouth, but something at once softer and more terrifying. Dauði’s shadow cradles them, swaddles them in crimson, and hushes once more, “Sleep.”

They smell smoke. They hear the crackling of embers and cannot make sense of the palpable comfort that washes over them.

They close their eyes and breathe in deep and feel . . .

Nothing.

Chapter Text

Consciousness comes in unreliable waves. Back-and-forth. Inconsistent. A fickle tide that pushes-and-pulls at them. Gentle. But heavy and slow. Sluggish. Like half-frozen sea water. The same, suffocating darkness drowning them, but also different and new.

They could not find the surface before, and they cannot find it now.

Their brimstone anchorage is absent.

At least, they think it is. If they are even thinking at all.

Flashes of sight and sound, coming and going at random and without reason. Distant voices. Faded and murmuring indecipherable words to one another. Sometimes it sounds as if there are entire groups.

Sometimes there is only one voice - speaking to no one. Or to them?

It never seems to expect an answer.

But, inexplicably, it draws them away from the frozen depths of this endless ocean. Towards the surface. It always seems to leave just before they can break above the tide and draw in air.

“How long’s this gonna go on for?” There it is, that voice.

Desperately, they swim towards that distant and familiar rumbling.

Please, I’m right here.

“Hard ta say. Could be any day now, or . . .”

“Don’t bother finishing that thought,” the voice grows further as it speaks, “just remembered I actually don’t care.” It’s walking away.

No, I’m right here! Please, do not leave!

“Don’t’cha mind him none, ya hear? Take all the time yuh need to.”

The other voice is speaking to them now, attempting to soothe and reassure them.

This voice is gentle. Sweet and warm and welcoming, like the bilberry mead of their youth. But it matters little; they are already being pulled back into the depths by the downcurrents of this darkness.

There is nothing else, for a terribly long time. Or no time, or very little. All at once, and not at all. Then there is everything.

They wake, though it happens in pieces.

Sound comes first, as it always has. A mechanical hum greets them, harmonized by rhythmic beeping. A familiar hiss-and-wheeze of ventilator valves. The larger counterpart to the device they have always worn. They are aware of more than they have been previously, in their fleeting blips of consciousness.

Scent comes next. Everything is cloyingly sterile. Bleached plastic, and floors scrubbed with hydrogen peroxide, and isopropyl-soaked latex.

Their eyelids feel even heavier than before– well, whatever it is that ‘before’ might have been.

As soon as they can force them open the regret is immediate; everything is slippery and overbright. It is blinding, to the degree that they can’t even make out the general shapes of their surroundings. They try to lift an arm to shield their face, and their finger barely manages a twitch.

They try to call out to anyone, to anything, and their throat clicks uselessly.

“I’ll go get the doc,” a voice says.

By the time the words register, they hear an automated door sliding closed across the room.

That voice is familiar . . .

The fact that someone else has been in the room with them this whole time is not nearly as alarming as it should be. It does not disturb them like it normally would. Their brain is made of cotton; soft and warm and pleasantly unbothered by everything. They are too preoccupied with trying to force their body into cooperation.

Once their eyes finally adjust to the blinding fluorescent lights overhead, the room does not get any less offensive. White slate walls and white linoleum floors and the gleaming white metal of various machines. Whoever designed this room has a sadistic sense of humor.

They attempt to lift their arm again, and it is rueful in it’s compliance. The limb is groggy; too heavy and uncoordinated. They also feel a sudden, slight tug near their wrist.

Their body is a torpid thing as they heave it upwards against the mountain of pillows at their back. Pain brushes against them in various spots, but it is dullard and easily ignored. Only with too much effort do they manage to position themself in an awkward half-sit and get a better look at themself. They are instantly met with white-hot panic scorching through their bones, down to the marrow.

Wires and bands and tubes and needles. Their hands and wrists are swarmed by this fulsomely sickening collection.

Immediately, they have to look away. An intense wave of nausea tears through them like the currents of a riptide and the back of their throat tastes medicinal and their lungs are burning. Their skin is beginning to itch and writhe where the intravenous needles are taped down and it feels as though a colony of carnivorous worms is living within their veins; eating and feasting and gnawing their way to the surface.

The back of their shoulders and neck prickle as they flush, uncomfortably warm, with panic.

There is too much technology - too much everything - and it is all too bright, too unfamiliar, too colorless.

They need to get out of here.

The door across the room opens just as the awful howling of their panic has convinced them to grab as many of the wires as their fist can hold and shakes them with a deafening roar - pull; pull now! - and suddenly across the room there is a shock of red against all of the white.

Relief sparks in their chest immediately and engulfs them, and they do not know why.

They smell smoke.

The worms beneath their skin all suffocate and go still. They let go of the wires.

Good sense was slow to catch up with them. Now that it has, they make the wise decision to keep their eyes away from their arms and, eventually, their heart slowly stops rabbiting so wildly within their chest.

That towering pillar of red lingers by the door. A familiar figure has followed it into the room. Pink hair, warm brown skin, and a gentle face. They know her. They trust her. It is comforting to see her approach the various monitors and tubes and bags of strange fluids that they’re all strung up and wired to.

She knows what each of it means. She will protect them from all of it. She will not let them be turned into–

Into . . .

Their attention snaps back to the pillar of red and their muzzy understanding finally catches itself up to what their eyes are seeing. Recognition clicks, like a corroded gear finally breaking free of the built-up sediment and spinning wildly back into rhythm.

Revenant folds his arms across his chest and leans against the wall, just to the left of the door.

“Yuh vitals look good,” Ajay - yes, that is her name - she looks at them as she speaks. She’s smiling.

They’re still staring at Revenant.

The simulacrum is staring back.

Ajay meets their silence with a concerned sigh through her nose. She turns to give Revenant a curious look, “They said anythin’ yet?”

“Came and got you soon as they started twitching. Didn’t feel like sticking around for conversation.”

She rolls her eyes with enough force, its a wonder it doesn’t make a sound. A dismissive wave of her hand, a scoffed breath. Then her attention is back on them. There is a focus in her eyes that they have always admired; a dedication to her craft and to the care of her patients.

“Hound,” her tone is what finally convinces them to break this unwinnable staring contest with the simulacrum. There is a gravity in the way that she calls their name, and it grounds their mind back into attention. “Can yuh understand me?” She asks.

They finally, finally pull their eyes away from that towering beacon. “Yes,” they rasp.

Their voice is whisper soft, brittle like sheet ice, coarser than the volcanic sands of Talos. Ruined from disuse, and from horrors they cannot remember. A sad and pitiful mockery of what it once was. It shames and embarrasses them to hear.

Revenant is tapping his fingers rhythmically against his upper-arm. They focus on that, instead.

“Good,” Ajay’s relief is evident in the sigh she breathes between her words. “Do ya know who yuh are?”

They open their mouth to answer, and hesitate. Revenant’s fingers go still.

“Yes,” they say. Eventually.

They know they are Blóðhundr, that much is not in question. They know they live in a village on Talos. They know they became chief after the death of their uncle, Artur.

It is the knowledge of everything that has come after that finds trouble returning to them. It does so slowly, and without order. Clumsy and senseless ice floes bouncing between each other before beaching themselves on the banks of their memory.

“Okay.” She is less reassured by their hesitance, but accepts it. “Do ya know who we are?”

So very nearly is Bloodhound drawn back into another futile staring contest. They resist the urge to meet Revenant’s maddening gaze. But only just.

“Yes. You are Ajay Chey, and . . .” they see the silent, towering shape of crimson and gunmetal grey flitting in the corner of their vision.

Savior.

The word springs into their mind unbidden, without warning.

Savior. Savior. Savior. Savior.

It circles so relentlessly around the inside of their skull, they wonder if he isn’t somehow manifesting it directly into their brain just to torment them. Just to humor himself. To stroke his own insufferable ego. He would goad them into saying it, they know, just so that he might refute the claim and belittle them for thinking such a thing at all.

Still, it refuses to leave.

Savior.

“Revenant,” they say, instead.

The pause and the exaggerated roll of their accent across his name gives it an unintentional discordance. They aim for conviction and strike closer to disdain.

Across the room, Revenant lets out an amused scoff.

“Hound,” Ajay draws their attention back to her, and her expression is twisted into something like remorse. Concern. It sits unnaturally on her face. When she speaks again, her tone is careful and slow. A weathered langskip picking cautiously around the jagged teeth of tempermental fjords.

“Do ya remember how yuh got here? What happened ta yuh? Anythin’ at all?”

“I . . . I remember only darkness, at first.”

Before the darkness there had been nothing. Is nothing, still. They tell her as much.

Any time they attempt to focus their thoughts, their mind protects itself and the shapes are lost. There is only the voice that had initially called out to them.

“Then . . . a voice.”

Revenant’s voice, they know now.

“And a great pain.”

Their memory refuses to acknowledge anything before his voice.

They’re staring at him again, and now Ajay is too.

“The voice spoke to me. It- it carried me away from that pain. From . . . wherever it had found me. A building of some kind, I think. This is . . . all I can remember, before this place.”

Slowly, Ajay turns away from Revenant, back to them. She goes to place a gentle hand against their arm but hesitates. She seems to think better of it, and rests her hand on the empty space of bed beside their leg instead. “Well . . . he found yuh, and– listen,” she starts, and then stops again. She lets out another slow and anxious sigh, “Bloodhound . . . yuh’ve been missin’ for five months.”

Five– that is nearly two full seasons on Talos.

It was late Spring, the last time they visited their village. Flowers had only just begun to bloom, fruits were beginning to come into season, and now . . .

They missed the yearly trip to the apple orchard. The fall harvest, and the pumpkins that the children carve.

They feel dizzy, for all that they have been sitting comfortably in a hospital bed for the entire conversation.

A hospital. That’s where they are, they realize.

Ajay is still speaking. “Yuh disappeared one day, an’ everyone just thought ya went back to yuh village . . . no one really thought much of it. Until Fitzroy went ta visit yuh. Folks said no one had seen yuh since the last off-season. He started askin’ ‘round, but– well . . . it was like yuh vanished.”

They hear her, distantly, but are far too preoccupied with trying to wrap their mind around the concept of five months. They cannot fathom it enough to muster a response to her. And they do not need to, as Revenant is so quick to interrupt the gentle delivery of her news.

“After two months of all the skinbags running around like chickens with their damn heads cut off, the Syndicate finally hired me to find you,” he says. And this explains why he was the one to rescue them. Not some bizarre, uncharacteristic act of concern. It was calculated and paid for.

He is quick to gloat as much, as though they should be flattered.

“Paid me a pretty penny to do it, too. Normally I get paid that kinda sum to make people disappear–”

“An’ it still took ya three months ta find ‘em!” Ajay snaps, accusation heavy in her tone. She has never been so patient as Bloodhound, when it comes to Revenant, though she is more tolerant than most.

“Actually only took two,” his dismissal of her interruption is breezy and unbothered. He almost sounds proud of himself. He likely is. “Spent the last month doing recon; scoping out the building, figuring out where they were keeping you. Had to make sure you weren’t dead yet, or else the whole thing was a waste of time.”

Bloodhound is not nearly so insulted by Revenant’s callous disregard as he would like them to be. They are still in a state of shock; too numb and dissociated to be barbed by him. For five entire months, no one has seen a trace of them. No one even knew if they were alive.

It hardly felt like they were, by the time Revenant rescued them.

No one could find them, and Ajay assures that everyone had been looking– had never stopped. There had been entire campaigns to locate the legendary hunter. And yet, only Revenant had succeeded.

That he had agreed to the Syndicate’s bribery at all is a miracle in itself.

He is rich beyond imagining, and has been for longer than Bloodhound has been alive. He is not so money-hungry and destitute as he would make everyone believe with his acceptance of their bounty.

The realization forces them violently back into the present, and they give a small jolt as they surface from the mire of their shock. “Thank you.”

Revenant was still in the middle of talking - of gloating - and their words catch him by surprise. He stops, mid-sentence, and a minute of silence passes. In the sudden calm, his eyes lock with theirs; burning and accusatory, as if he is searching for some hidden flaw that they cannot possibly know.

He thinks they are, perhaps, lying– or worse, making fun of him.

His left hand spasms involuntarily. “Didn’t do it for you.”

This interaction is no longer fun or thrilling for him. It is far too vulnerable and genuine now to make sport of. He makes as much known by the way he turns away to face towards the door, quick enough to cause the metal of his feet to scratch unpleasantly against the floor.

He is not quiet as he flees the room; his every footstep carries the weight of his annoyance, and Bloodhound can still hear his stomping even once he is well out of earshot.

“Tch, that boy . . .” Ajay murmurs, shaking her head as she focuses her attention back on the various machines that are tracking every one of Bloodhound’s vitals. She attaches a fresh bag of unknown liquid to one of their IVs. They try not to pay attention.

“He’s always whinin’ about somethin’, don’t’cha listen none.”

Bloodhound hums in amusement, eyes drifting back towards the door. “He would not be himself, otherwise. It is, perhaps, our only way of knowing that everything is well.”

She laughs at this, and it isn’t until that moment that they become abundantly aware of the cavernous ache that has been festering within their chest, for months it would seem. How desperately they have missed the joy and kindness of others.

How sweet it feels to experience anything other than unfathomable pain and torment.

“At least everyone else will be glad ta finally know how yuh are. Ya just let me know when yuh want me ta spread the word. In the meantime, I’ll go an’ get yuh somethin’ good to eat,” her smile radiates a sorely missed warmth as she looks back at them, finally laying a gentle hand against their own.

They look at her, curiously, as she begins to gather the tools she had brought in. “No one has visited?”

It is more of a genuine surprise than an admission of hurt feelings. Certain Legends were more understandable for their absence, but that anything would keep Walter or Andrade from visiting their bedside . . .

Ajay shakes her head, and misunderstands their confusion for worry. “Revenant an’ I been the only ones in here, since he brought yuh in. So don’t’cha worry none, no one else has seen yuh face ‘sides us.”

Immediately, Bloodhound lifts a hand and startles when their fingertips meet skin. Of course it makes sense; their helmet, goggles, and ventilator would have all needed to be removed in order for them to be medically assessed.

Ajay watches them paw at their own naked face with eyes full of sympathy for only a moment before she, too, heads towards the door.

“Where are my things,” they ask, before she entirely makes it there, and it gives her pause - as if it didn’t occur to her that Bloodhound might not have realized that such vital aspects to their personality were missing. She glances back at them from the doorway.

“Dunno, yuh didn’t have ‘em with ya when Revenant brought’cha in. He had ya covered with that scarf of his an’ wouldn’t let anyone else get close. Didn’t even know how bad yuh looked ‘til we were in a private room. But I’ll ask if he found ‘em anywhere, ya just get some rest.”

When she leaves, the words echo throughout the empty room long after the door closes behind her.

Chapter Text

‘And they gave sentence, that the dwarf should have his wager. Then Loki offered to keep his head, but to this the dwarf said ‘there was no chance.’
'Take me, then,' quoth Loki.
There the dwarf would have hewn off his head; but Loki said thus, ‘you might have the head, but of the neck no such wager was made.’ So then did Brokkr take up Sindri’s awl, and with a knife bore a hole in Loki's lips and stitched his mouth together.

That thong, with which Loki's mouth was sewn shut, is called Vartari.’
- Skáldskaparmál {p. 147}

Bloodhound requests a mirror after supper. They wish they hadn’t.

Quit, before you rip your whole mouth apart.

They understand him, now.

What they do not understand is his continual presence.

An ill omen, or a baleful guardian, they cannot decipher which. Whatever fate he plays harbinger to–their salvation or their demise–he rarely gives them a moments peace. They aren’t sure how to feel about it, yet.

He accompanies Ajay when she brings their food.

The meal is a paltry thing; bland and unappealing mush made strictly for nourishment above flavor or enjoyment. They distract themself by thinking of Haustmánuður– of the boar slowly roasting before the bonfire, while the entire village sang and danced and celebrated.

It makes the gruel go down just a little easier.

The simulacrum stays, as Ajay leaves to fetch the mirror they’ve requested.

He watches silently as they struggle to feed themself. As their once-capable hands tremor violently under the strain of lifting the simple plastic spoon to their tattered lips. It grates on their nerves more than his speaking would have. They’re unsure why.

They wish that he would insult them, as he usually does– that he would say something, anything at all.

Ajay returns. And, with her usual aplomb, she assures them that the injury is worse than it looks while they inspect their own face.

Most of their lips are intact, but scabbed horribly, and stitched once or twice near the corners where the pulling was the worst. They barely feel it; there is so much pain to feel, in every inch of them, that it simply gets lost in the screaming crowd of aching joints and weeping lacerations.

And then, of course - there is the medication that they have been subdued by, since they arrived, to help dull the agony of their body into a tolerable murmur. It is no surprise that they didn’t notice without the visual confirmation.

The healing of their mouth will be slow and the resulting scars will be ugly.

But she has delivered what they asked for and soon after departs with little fanfare beyond the order to get some rest, and the promise that she will see them again tomorrow.

Revenant leaves alongside her, but is there again periodically throughout the night as they toss and turn. They never hear him enter the room.

Its their first night of sleep since rescue and it is unpleasant.

Fevered dreams flit in-and-out of their subconscious, and each time they find themself half-waking from one or the next they catch sight of golden pinpricks glowing in different spots of the room.

The next day, when Ajay returns to discuss their laundry list of injuries and the treatments they will require, Revenant is already in the room.

She makes no comment on it. She hardly acknowledges him. Her focus is centered on more important matters; the care of her patient. And, by this point, it seems that she has grown accustomed to his constant shadowing of her work.

It is, perhaps, their one source of humor.

She leaves him to stand in his usual spot, leaning sentinel by the door, where he has likely been since last night.

Patiently, gently, she begins her assessment.

There is the obvious:

She doesn’t need to inform them of their broken arm. The cast and sling that cradle the limb do that well enough. She respects their intelligence enough to simply state, “yuh arm,” and accepts their sharp nod as understanding.

Similarly, the sharp pain that accompanies every breath is enough to indicate which part of their ribcage has been fractured, and approximately how many. She confirms their suspicion with a simple, “three ribs. Right side, numbers four, six, and seven.”

She points at her own body as a visual guide.

“They’ll heal on their own, so long as yuh let ‘em rest and don’t stress ‘em too much.”

“Understood.”

There are simply too many bruises and lacerations to name. And although she could likely discern where each of them came from–what manner of brutality was inflicted across every inch of Bloodhound–it would simply take too long.

And they do not care to hear any of it. They are content with the not knowing.

A cloud of steam bursts from Revenant’s nasal cavity as his body involuntarily flushes built-up heat from his systems, cooling itself. A simulated sigh.

“Last thing yuh need ta know,” she interrupts the observations of their wandering attention.

The way she comes to sit on the edge of their bed, and reaches for their good hand so gently, makes them skittish.

They have never received gentle deliveries to the hardships of their life; every loss they have suffered has been served with a brutality that only nature has perfected. But they know what it looks like.

They have seen it, in others.

This is the slow approach of a medical worker coming to stand before the gathered family, moments before the clinical mask is pulled down and that slow, telling shake of a head is given.

Bloodhound will need surgery.

“The appointment’s first thing in the morning. Ya gonna need an empty stomach, plenty of fluids . . .”

Their attention is waxing and waning, again.

Revenant is staring at the back of Ajay’s head with an unreadable look. He doesn’t blame her, or perhaps he does. But his hand is twitching and flexing in that telling way that catalogs exactly what particular brand of annoyance he feels.

“--shattered patella. Ya whole knee is gonna need replacin’–”

His shoulder plates shift; flexing apart and then back together, as a human might roll theirs.

They wonder if his jaw would be rhythmically clenching-and-unclenching, if it could. If he still had flesh and muscle, if they might have been able to see him physically chewing on whatever thought was circling around his head, in that moment.

“--gonna be on bedrest for at least a week, after surgery.”

Bloodhound hums, solemnly, giving the illusion of attention.

“Hound,” she says.

They hum again.

“Bloodhound,” she repeats, with more fervor.

They blink their focus back into clarity and center it on her, “yes.”

“This is important,” and the way she stresses the word leaves a heavy stone in the pit of their stomach; they aren’t going to like this, “after bedrest, ya gonna need physical therapy. And . . . this sorta replacement surgery can take up ta eight months ta heal. Sometimes longer.”

“How long,” they ask, flatly.

“Sometimes a year.”

They have to physically keep their attention from wandering back towards the door, digging their nails into the meat of their palm as they clench their good hand into a crushing fist.

“That means,” she continues; slowly, pointedly, “no climbing. No stairs, no jumping, no running. Not even gonna be safe for yuh to kneel without hurting y’self. Ya cannot do anythin’ ta strain the joint, ya hear me? Else yuh might never recover. Understand?”

“I do.” And its the truth, although bitter and despised.

She graces them with a moment of silence, allowing them a breath to process this sudden and horrible reality. They feel hot– feverish with shame, anger, and misery. Their throat burns in a telling way, and Ajay does them a kindness by pretending not to notice the tears that have begun to gather along their eyelashes.

“I already talked to yuh manager,” she tells them, looking down at their hands instead. The warm latex of her thumb brushes across the back of their palm, following the ridges and valleys of their pronounced knuckles.

They will be benched for three entire seasons, at least.

The Syndicate was already aware of their situation, of course– they had been the ones to hire Revenant for their rescue, after all.

And now that their manager has informed the Syndicate of their diagnosis, accommodations were being made. Bloodhound was being provided every luxury that the Syndicate cared to afford. Which, although more than most, wasn’t a lot.

The Syndicate will be giving them a laughably small stipend to ‘support’ them through their recovery period. Their surgery is being paid for, but they will be discharged as soon as it is medically safe.

They will be shuttled back to their village at the first available opportunity– the Syndicate is offering to pay for a single economy ticket, but any additional tickets or seating upgrades must be paid from their own pocket.

They will be responsible for procuring their own physical therapy and outpatient care.

This is the treatment and care offered to one of their greatest champions. This is the luxury afforded towards the infamous Bloodhound, whom the Syndicate cared enough about that they would spend an arduous sum of money to have returned.

The Syndicate just didn’t want to lose the viewership of Bloodhound’s loyal fanbase, is the reality of it, they know.

Bloodhound wasn’t a person to be cared or concerned for. They were just a series of numbers and statistics. A cog in the machine, if you will.

They glance towards Revenant through their glossy vision.

He’s pretending to study his fingers.

They feel a helplessness they have not experienced since their parents were still alive. Their entire being, reduced down to something fragile that must be coddled lest it break beyond repair.

The greatest hunter in the entire Outlands, now no better than an effigy of spun glass.

An uneasy reality for them to accept.

“I’ll let yuh rest,” Ajay gives their hand a gentle pat before she stands. They hear her sigh through her nose before she turns away from their bedside to leave them, to let them stew in their own thoughts.

Her retreating footsteps pause at the door. “Now, don’t’cha go and start botherin’ them, ya hear! You leave them be!”

Her tone is bright and clipped, but carries no real venom. She speaks as if talking to a particularly unruly cat with a penchant for clawing the furniture.

Revenant’s dismissive growl is his only retort.

The view through Bloodhound’s window is familiar and foreign all at once; they recognize enough to know that they are somewhere on Psamathe’s orbital station, but the exact location is unknown to them.

Syndicate worker drones and company vehicles bustle like robotic zombies through the streets below their view. An unnamed, faceless mass of people working for a conglomerate as uncaring of their individual struggles as the masses are of a village they will never know, experiencing hardships they cannot understand.

How is Bloodhound possibly meant to lead and protect their people from the confines of a bed? They cannot afford to give Hammond an inch of uncontested ground upon Talos.

But there is nothing they can do. Nothing that might change what has been done.

This room is a prison cell, and their apparent jailor makes for terrible conversation.

The boiling tide trapped within their chest swells, and their breath hitches involuntarily. Their good hand clenches down around the scratchy, too-thin fabric serving as their blanket. What little is left of their pride revolts against this natural grief that digs its claws so deeply into their soul.

So much of them has been weakened and brought low. They will not allow themself this weakness on top of it all.

Not in front of him.

He seems to sense the thought as soon as it springs to the forefront of their mind, in some uncanny way. They struggle to keep their head above the floodwaters of their runaway emotions, and he pushes away from the wall to make for the door.

But the thought of him leaving– the thought of being left alone . . .

“R-Revenant.”

He stops, and that surprises them.

They half expected him to continue walking, and ignore their call entirely. But instead he turns, pivoting his body to face them fully. The single step he takes towards the edge of their bed is his version of an unspoken question.

“Artur . . .” they ask, for lack of anything else to say. Their brain is a livewire; oversensitive, raw, and full of static. They don’t know why they called out to him– why they sought him out, of all living things, for comfort. So now they must make something up.

But he knows. Of course he knows. Still, he says nothing to point it out. For this moment, just this once, he plays along.

“On Talos,” is his answer, with his tone betraying nothing.

Their next question is one they have been agonizing over and terrified of since they woke up. Every time they had meant to ask Ajay during one of her visits, they froze, and the words lodged uncomfortably in the back of their throat, unspoken.

They choke again, now, and the words trip over themselves coming out of Bloodhound’s mouth, unfinished.

“Is he—?“

“Fine? Yeah,” Revenant answers, before the question even completes its haphazard escape, leaving no room for misunderstanding. “Terrorizing the local wildlife, last time I checked.”

Their breath hitches again. That one simple statement undoes them entirely, and the tenuous at best grasp they have on their emotions slips away completely. Their good hand lifts to shield their face as they feel their eyes well up and spill over before they can put a stop to it.

They try to pass it off as them massaging a headache away from their temples.

They will not shame themself further by crying in front of him. But he knows . . . of course he knows.

Since he checked. He has been checking.

What could have ever compelled this selfish, hateful machine to routinely check on their pet bird?

“Thank you,” they say, in leu of anything else, their voice thick and clogged in that telling way.

He grunts, his usual acknowledgement.

They hear the sound of his footsteps heading for the door again, and that panic begins to swell once more; whipped into a frenzy like a hive of agitated wasps.

“I–,” they start, and hesitate, watching as his distorted and waterlogged figure stops a second time. “Have– I heard your voice, while I was– before I woke up . . .”

“You got a point?” And he tilts his head as he asks, at just the right angle that the curvature of his unmoving brow seems to arch itself questioningly.

“I just wondered . . . have you been here, in the room, this whole time?”

He answers, without directly saying the words, without naked admission. He hides himself, cloaked in half-truths, because the full truth of it is too much of a human thing for him to stomach.

“Had to make sure no one snuck in to finish the job. Syndicate wouldn’t pay me if you up and died. The agreement was I brought you back alive, and you stayed alive.”

His intentions remain as elusive as the smoke he manifests.

Surely he is not the only one who could have kept watch– they know that he isn't. He is once again relying on the convenient excuse of his imaginary greed.

But greed did not compel him to hide their face, or insist they be left in the care of one of the few people that Bloodhound trusted with such sensitive information. Or to keep tabs on Artur.

“Soon as you’re discharged, its no longer my problem,” he continues.

They let him believe that he’s sold the lie.

Although it itches to do so, as fiercely as the stitches around their mouth, they will not pick at either scab. Not yet, not so soon.

“I see.”

They pick the lint from their blanket instead, sniffing as the last of their tears begin to slowly dry up. “Ajay says that you two have been the only ones in here, but . . . I thought I heard other voices, before. More than just two.”

“Probably dreaming. The meds she’s got you on do that, sometimes,” he says, in a tone that draws from a deep well of experience. “Or you probably heard me talking to someone at the door. Few people came by, pissed I wouldn’t let ‘em in.”

They nod lamely. He watches them for a moment, as if waiting, before taking a half-step towards the door and stopping preemptively, as though expecting them to speak up again and prevent his exit a third time.

They had opened their mouth to do so, but came up short with any further excuses to delay him. Its damning enough.

He rolls his eyes and turns away from the door, seeming to give up for the time being. He resigns himself, then, back over to his preferred spot against the wall, folding his arms across his chest as he leans there; making himself as comfortable as possible in such a decidedly uncomfortable body.

“Couldn’t find your stuff, by the way. I looked.”

“You–?”

“Went back, last night, to where I found you. Didn’t remember seeing ‘em when I came and got you, but thought maybe I missed something. Doesn’t matter, anyways . . . whole place has been cleared out.”

“Ah . . . well, thank you, for checking.”

The golden glare of his optics convey the imagery of bared teeth in a way that his immobile face cannot, and he growls to accompany it.

“Gonna start charging you a fee, every time you say that . . . told you already; I’m just doing my job.”

It humors them, the way a bone humors a dog. They nearly want to thank him for that, just to spite him. Just to chew a little further on his nerves. They think he knows it, too, from the way his optics spiral tighter, narrowing in on them suspiciously.

It nearly gets them to crack a smile. Nearly.

“You gonna start cryin’ again if I leave the room for five minutes?”

Ah . . . and there goes the desire, just as quickly.

So be it, then.

Their eyes harden down into a glare befitting a sighthound, and they bare their own teeth around the metaphorical bone in their mouth. And it grits in their jaws as they sneer:

“I will be fine. Thank you for asking.”

From the way he snarls as he storms from the room, Bloodhound knows that he would have slammed the door if he could have. As it was, they watch it slide gently closed behind him, apathetic to his tantrum.

They doze in the interim while he’s gone. The rest is not easy nor peaceful, by any stretch of the imagination, but it does well enough to pass the time.

It also distracts them from the growing pains of hunger that gnaw at their insides.

In the end, they are woken abruptly by something light yet solid being tossed onto their chest. They startle, panic spiking their heart rate in a way that makes the machines monitoring their pulse beep nervously.

Their brain frenzies itself, anticipating a violence they cannot recall, but it is enough to force them to snap upright into a half-sit. The sudden motion twists their ribs uncomfortably, causing them to let out a pained hiss.

“Helvítis . . .”

Their side begins to throb. In the back of their mind, Ajay lectures them about straining their ribs, her words falling into tempo with the ache.

“Gonna have to make due with these,” Revenant’s voice drawls from their left.

The proximity surprises them. He is standing so close, his shins nearly knock against the side of their bed. Its the closest he has come to them, thus far.

When they turn their head to glare up at him, he towers over them, very nearly blotting out the overhead lights with his impressive looming. And, unsurprisingly, he seems completely unrepentant for scaring them and the pain it has caused.

They glance at the exposed insides of his thigh and fantasize, briefly, about grabbing as many wires as their good hand can hold and pulling with all their might. He shifts his weight onto one hip, as if daring them to try.

Bloodhound lets the fantasy slip away. At least for the moment.

When they look down at their chest, a pair of plain welding goggles stare back at them.

“Mod girl had a spare set she said you could use.”

Oh. They blink, and it is not so surprising, but a pleasant turn of events, regardless.

“Ramya? You went to see her?”

They pick up the goggles for inspection.

“Yeah. Figured if anyone had something I could use, it’d be her.” His hands flex, open and then closed. He is still hovering, close enough for them to smell the acrid coolant running through his lines. “She wanted to know if you were dead yet.”

There is nothing particularly special about the goggles he has brought– nothing like their own pair, with its infrared and thermal sensors, among other capabilities. But the lenses are large and tinted, too dark to see through, and that will be enough.

“Is that all?”

“Do I look like your messenger? She can tell you all that sappy shit herself.”

They hum in acknowledgement, struggling briefly to unclasp the goggles with one hand.

“Soon, perhaps.” But not now. Not yet.

“Tell it to the doc. I don’t care.”

It should be expected, his constant and pugnacious baiting of their patience. An exhausting thing, to be sure. And yet, he never seems to anticipate just how easily they can turn his own techniques back on him.

Attempting to fasten the head strap with one hand isn’t just difficult for them - it is impossible. But they try, regardless . . . mostly just to annoy him. It works.

Revenant watches them fumble with the task for approximately half a minute; they count the seconds in the increasing twitches of his hands. It takes longer than they expect before that brittle-thin patience of his finally breaks.

“Give me those,” he snarls, snatching the goggles right out of their grip before they can stop him.

“I would have managed, eventually.”

“Yeah, sure. Tell yourself that,” he sneers as he, ungently, pulls their head nearer to him, causing an unpleasant twinge in their already sore neck. Briefly, they are reminded of Elder Ráðný, how she would tug and yank at their head, attempting to wrench their hair into submission for ceremonial braids.

Bloodhound had kept their hair shorn for much of their youth to spare their scalp from her handling.

As Revenant begins to fasten the strap of the headband himself, they hear him grumble beneath synthetic breath, “I’d’ve died of old age before you ever got the belt through the damn buckle.”

They lift a hand, partially to assist him, but mostly to ease their own discomfort of having all of their hair pressed so firmly against their skull beneath the headband. They are immediately stunned by a dismissive slap to their hand, knocking it away before it could even come close.

He baffles them by taking the time and effort to straighten the goggles out, ensuring that they sit properly on Bloodhound’s face. And then confounds them further still when he begins the tedious work of pulling their bangs free from the band; fussing over their hair to ensure it falls properly over the goggles.

His fingers, like dangerous needles, pluck and pull and comb until their unruly vermillion mane complies. Elder Ráðný would surely be seething with jealousy, had her ashes not been scattered a decade ago.

“You look ridiculous . . . but at least now I don’t have to see it when you start crying.”

They draw in a breath as they open their mouth, and he immediately silences them by pressing his index finger against the center of their forehead, digging the sharpened tip into the fleshy plane there. Not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to make a point.

“You say ‘thank you’ one more time and I’ll kill you myself.”

“I was going to say,” mischief colors Bloodhound’s tone as they speak, tipping their chin upwards indignantly, “that your bedside manner is atrocious.”

His other hand twitches and his shoulder plates roll and flex apart before sinking back together. The tip of his finger digs into their forehead a little deeper, and they know he will leave a mark. But there is something satisfying about the sting of his touch; something so fundamentally different to the terrified memory of pain that hunts and chases them, sending them fleeing from the comfort of sleep in a cold sweat and a racing heart.

He tilts his head just so, as if studying them for all of their unflinching satisfaction. They have never recoiled from him before, and whatever he happens to see on their face in that moment, it seems to please him that nothing has changed now.

And they find that they are also pleased, for some ill-shapen reason that they cannot find the thread to. But, perhaps, maybe not so much has changed after all.

“I hope they sever an artery, when they’re digging around in your knee tomorrow. How’s that for bedside manner.”

“Unfortunate for you, I would imagine, considering that it would forfeit your payment,” they say without smiling.

He grunts his assent, withdrawing his hand away from their face, “I liked it better when you didn’t talk so much. When you were unconscious.” He side-steps to fall unceremoniously into the chair next to their bed, lifting both feet to drop them directly onto Bloodhound’s stomach, crossing them at the ankles. Not forceful enough to wind them, but enough to be uncomfortable.

Somehow, he narrowly avoids the worst of the bruising near their hip. They do not think its accidental.

Lazily, he folds his arms behind his head. When Bloodhound slowly and pointedly pushes his feet off of their stomach, he puts them right back. “Ever think about trying that again? You should.”

“Last time that I tried, a velafolk with horrible bedside manner came into my room to throw goggles at me and woke me up.”

“Yeah, and now the surgeons could do their jobs without you complaining, and I won’t have to gouge out their eyes. So glad that I could make everyone so happy,” he sneers, optics rolling as he speaks and landing somewhere in the middle distance, across the room.

Wherever it is that his sight takes him, they cannot follow.

They hear the telling, rhythmic beep of the machine that dispenses their routine dosage of medications designed for pain management.

“Hm. I’m afraid I can offer no gratitude,” they push his feet off, and again they come right back, heavier this time. Or perhaps it is just the sedatives. Everything feels heavier. He is exhausting and their bones are made of lead.

“Doing so would cost someone a lot of money. You will have to find satisfaction on your own.” They hear the slur in their own voice and can do nothing to stop it.

“Think I can manage,” he says, “now shut up and go to sleep. You’re giving me a headache.”

“Góða nótt, Revenant.”

“Whatever.”

Chapter Text

They swim in the depths of Ginnungagap’s belly.

Dark and dense and overly warm, with pockets of too-cold. They can find no mid-ground for a foothold, and there is no happiness here.

It is disorienting; at once familiar and new. Discomforting in its quiet.

A sudden rapture of their sense of Self. They have always been this way, they do not recognize their own reflection. There is no reflection down here, where no light can permeate. Where sound and touch and good sense sink, like a whale fall, to rot slowly and feed the bottom-dwellers.

The carcass of a beast, on the coast of a tropical island, now serving as little more than set decoration. A life now reduced to a spectacle made for the world.

They are nourishment, caught in a perpetual cycle of depressurizing, sinking, festering, and sustaining those that crawl sleepily out of the abyss to pick their carcass clean. Sponsors tell them where to stand, which way to look. But no matter where they turn, they cannot see the surface.

Ginnung enjoys the taste of their marrow and thinks to itself: perhaps I shall not spit you back out, this time.

“No,” there comes that deep and shuddering voice to answer their unspoken riddling, “that’s just the meds. It happens sometimes.”

The words crack and shatter, like the bone-deep thundering of an avalanche. Molten in their softness, like a mountain erupting. This thing that haunts Ginnungagap’s starved pursuit of their consciousness . . . what is a shadow to the void itself? What does it look like? How does it smell?

“It happens,” the voice repeats.

“What does?”

He is reaching for them.

His vestige cuts through the darkness like snow drifting across the surface of tar; in-and-out, viscous, dissolving. The hood of his cowl spills forward over his shoulder, and it bleeds. Crimson fabric soaking up the essence of ginnung until the threads split into a thousand fractures, separating into jet black hair. Long and gleaming and gossamer, like an oil spill.

The scent of burnt oil fills the entire room.

Ginnungagap has become a room.

The walls are beige, then canvas, then sandstone. A culmination of all three, at last. There is furniture. They cannot name any of it.

His hands are flesh, now. He was something else, before. The red of his palms is no longer silicone. It is dripping.

“You . . . you are dead.” They state the obvious, made lame by their own shock.

“Was, I suppose,” he responds. His bleeding palms are still reaching out towards them. The stigmata runs from his eyes, down the curvature of his cheek in a painted line. It is the wrong face. “Not anymore. Haven’t been, for a long time.”

“But I wanna be,” another voice says, from their left.

Still his voice, but different. Younger. Clearer, perhaps. Unprocessed.

This unfettered eidolon of him reaches out and clasps their shoulder, and it asks, “do you?”

What do you mean?

“Do you want me dead?”

But if you were . . .

Hands reach suddenly out towards them. From every angle, they come pouring forth like misbegotten spiders. The room is made of concrete. The swarming multitude grab at them; clawing, pinning them down. Pale flashes of skin beneath a washed-out overhead light, sourceless and unrelenting.

“Do you want–”

Each time they try and pull free, the hands grip down tighter.

Each time they think they might escape, they are pulled back into this horrifying spotlight.

Look, turn this way, the camera needs to see the brand logo.

Hands grip at their clothes, pulling and tearing until the seams begin to pop. Blunted fingernails dig into the skin of their jaw, wrenching their head into position and holding it firmly in place.

You fuss and struggle so frustratingly, and I would have you cease, afore I pin you by force; that I might weave you for ceremony without disruption.

Hands grabbing fistfulls of hair, digging into their scalp. It pricks painfully as strands are uprooted.

“Do you want to die?”

They cannot move, and their head is pulled back at such an angle, it is difficult to even breathe.

Flashes of skin, and the gleam of a needle.

They do not understand what is happening until it has already begun.

Vartari is pulled taught; over, through, and under. Cinched and looped. Coiled hatefully between their lips until they are sealed tight. Screams of anger become muffled, and their world tastes of copper.

The noise of their rage and anguish is drowned out by vindictive laughter. It surrounds them, just like the hands.

The wickedness of that nál returns, dangerously close to their eye.

They cannot breathe.

They cannot breathe.

There should be smoke.

They cannot breathe.

Blood.

It is all they can taste. They are going to drown.

“Blood.”

They blink. Once, and then again. Their eyes feel heavy and dry with fatigue.

The concrete has been polished to a sterile linoleum. A figure swims at the center of their vision; brown skin, pink hair. She is surrounded by masked and gowned individuals, all of them backlit by the unrelenting fluorescence.

“It’s time,” she says.

Gloved hands reach towards them.

Desperately, they try to fight. It matters little that they vaguely recognize her shape, her voice. The comfort she brings and the knowledge of her safety is all but swept away by the Yawning Void’s floodwaters. Here, in this haze of half-waking and unreality, she is just as much a threat for the hands that she extends towards them.

But their laughable attempts at self-defense are futile; their limbs weighed down and made cumbersome by the lead of their bones. Each swing of their uncasted arm is slow and ineffective.

Do not touch me, they try to say.

All that comes out is unintelligible growling.

“Easy, now! Don’t go hurtin’ y’self further, it’s just me,” she says, “I’m not gonna let nothin’ happen to ya!”

“Where . . .”

She misunderstands them. “Still in yuh room, right where I left ya.”

Hands begin to knowingly tamper with the wires and cables all taped to their body. The machine of their soul is cold and quiet; unresponsive. They cannot hear the mechanical tempo of their own heartbeat. The room smells overly sterile, and it is difficult to breathe.

The unspoken end of their question is interrupted as hands reach out, like a swarm of locusts descending upon the wheat fields. Sensors, monitors, and needles all plucked from them like kernels of grain from the stalks.

If they look too directly at the lights overhead, they can scarcely make out the sweltering visions of vultures circling high above. Too high for any of these shapeless, masked figures to see. But they can see.

They can see.

Soon, now, the scavengers will descend, avian hands outstretched, and the needles will come again to make good on that bargain over their neck.

But then they are wrenched up and over, transferred ungently to something more mobile, and the vultures overhead scatter as their vision begins to swim.

Pain shoots like a livewire up through their side, and it panicks them further.

“Where is he? Hvar er vél?”

Their own voice is nearly unrecognizable beneath the medicated slur of their words.

She still does not understand them. “Don’t’cha worry about him none. He won’t bother ya, I promise.”

Nei, they want to explain, but she is already talking to someone else–one of the masked figures, dressed in a sterile gown–and they are already being wheeled out of this room that they have grown familiar with.

He always comes here, to this room– how will he find them if they are not here?

He is meant to make sure nothing else happened to them.

He is meant to ensure their safety.

The hallways are winding and dizzyingly identical.

They do not want to disappear for another half-year.

The sound of their gurney pushing open a set of doors is alarmingly sudden and loud. A mistimed gunshot going off inside a concrete warehouse. A bullet grazing paint off of living steel. The noise will attract others, but none of them have the firepower that is necessary.

“Almost there,” she says, walking beside them, “all good.”

They are brought into a room that is too dark, too cold, and too open. There is equipment, and they cannot name any of it.

Their parade of clinical pallbearers bring them to rest beneath a single and blinding overhead light. This one does not swing at the slightest provocation, but it moves when commanded, and it is no less intrusive.

The silhouette of a man comes to tower over them. Hands reach towards them, securing them with more wires; more sensors, more needles, and a foul-smelling mask that is pulled to rest over their noise and mouth. A nauseating mixture of sterile plastic and something medicinal.

The surgeon instructs Bloodhound, “take a deep breath in, and count backwards from ten for me.”

The oxygen around their airways becomes heavy, and the smell of it makes their stomach churn threateningly. But there is nothing to vomit.

“Hvar er hann?”

They cannot hold their breath any longer.

They cannot breathe.

“Just start countin’, Hound, it’s alright,” she places a reassuring hand against their shoulder.

“It’ll be over ‘fore yuh know it.”

The silhouettes towering over them begin to twist and swim through their waterlogged vision. These ghost-pale figures, waiting for the carcass of their next meal. Not wearing masks at all, they can see now, but beaks hooked and sharp; made for stabbing and plucking and pulling thread through the wounds left behind.

Beneath the protective goggles, the close their eyes tight to spare themself the sight of it any longer. Their lungs burn horribly, and they lose the fight against their own body as instinct takes over. Their inhale is sharp and desperate, and there comes a stabbing sensation from deep within their chest.

They feel afraid.

They wake, in pieces, and vertigo wrings their stomach into knots like an old dish towel.

Their life is caught in a hellish cycle, repeating itself, eating its own tail, and Bloodhound cannot get free. They will never be free again.

They will be trapped, here, in this bed in this room, until their body decays. Should they ever attempt to escape, they will only wake up right back in this spot, they know; confused and disoriented, and so heavily medicated that they can scarcely recall what it’s like to have a clear mind anymore.

This deep, gluttonous Misery hissing in their ear is an ugly and putrid thing that had begun to eat and eat and eat and eat away at their will to live. Until they are very nearly convinced that they might not ever get up again from whatever surface they are strewn across now.

What is the point in it all?

Something shifting nearby catches enough of their curiosity that they slowly open one eye, and then the other, to face and take in whatever grievance has come to haunt them now.

Hands reach out towards them.

"Hm. Dauði’s insufferable shadow . . . come to finish the job, at last." They hear their own delirium, and can do nothing about it. They watch themself from outside of their own body.

The sharpened tip of an index finger presses against the center of their forehead. Cold metal against feverish skin.

It is . . . strangely grounding.

"Nah, not yet. Gettin' paid too much to keep you alive, remember?"

"Small mercies," they say.

Their companion says something more, but Bloodhound has become deaf to it. Their head has re-submerged beneath the high tide of ginnung’s emptiness, and salt water fills their ears and the space between.

A weariness they have never experienced pulls their eyes closed against their bidding, as their senses dull pleasantly. Something soft brushes near to their face, so lightly they barely take notice of it before they slip once again into the comfortable spot between Ginnungagap’s ribs.

Held tightly, safely, but impermanently kept.

Like the slow withdrawal of high tide, sleep pulls back quietly.

"Overburdened yourself again," comes a voice they recognize. That low and familiar rumbling they have become so accustomed to, by now.

When they attempt to respond, the muscles of their throat move silently, and the words die behind their teeth.

Perhaps it is more surprising just how unbothered they feel at the uselessness of their current condition. It is normally such a suffocating thing, being trapped within their own body to any degree. But for this brief and merciful moment the world is a little kinder; soft, gentle, and the room smells faintly of smoke–like the cold embers of an extinguished fire.

Faintly, too far for them to discern between memory and reality, they hear laughter.

Such youthful joys are common, in their village. Young and aspiring hunters gathered near the dying coals of a bonfire, picking the last of the evenings feast from between their teeth.

Tomorrow the pelts will tanned and made into garments. The bones will be sharpened and whittled into weapons and jewelry.

There is a strange sensation, near their feet. A faint fluttering akin to some small thing being set down and picked up; too light to truly feel, but certainly there.

One eye cracks open beneath their borrowed goggles, and surprise quickly forces the other open thereafter.

Revenant sits in the same chair as the previous day, feet propped upon the edge of their bed just as before with his legs crossed casually at the ankles. This is not such a shocking thing– not anymore, at least.

No, the shock comes from who sits across from Revenant, on the other side of their bed: it is Mara, of all people.

She is, perhaps, the last they expect– for a number of reasons.

The absurdity of it is enough to shake the last cobwebs of drowsiness from their medicated stupor. And what a blessing, that the goggles hide the worst of their wide-eyed staring as they attempt to discern whether the sight before them is real.

Revenant and Mara are playing a card game of some sort.

The context and rules of the game are lost to Bloodhound, but it seems this is not the first game between the two of them. Whatever the stipulations happen to be, they seem rather convoluted.

The cards are arranged into six vertical lines, three for each player, spread haphazardly across the blankets atop Bloodhound’s shins. There comes a dull and painless throbbing from their knee which tells them that it should be aching horribly, but medication keeps the worst of it at bay.

Mara’s rows of cards are overlong, and there seems to be little thought behind how her cards are assembled; they are reckless and scattershot, the way her regard for safety so often seems to be. Something that was never more apparent than in that moment, by this rage-sick Vánagandr that she so whimsically indulges.

Bloodhound notices that each player has their own deck to draw from, and their methods of doing so are just as opposed as their personalities. Mara is jealously guarding the cards in her hands. Revenant, meanwhile, barely hides his hand.

He waits, patiently, with rows neatly organized and calculated before him. Pragmatic and arrogant. He is just as lackadaisical about gambling as he is about killing, apparently–as he is about everything.

By body language alone, it isn’t difficult to discern that Mara seems to be losing. Rather grievously, at that. She does a poor effort of masking her wounds, in this at least.

Worry and frustration are as noticeable on her face as a Prowler would be in a street market.

And, with all the urgency of an overfed house cat, Revenant pulls a card from his hand and places it into his center line. He makes no commentary as Mara begins to grumble under her breath, picking all of the diamond suits from her opposing row with a clear annoyance.

By body language alone, they know he would be smirking if he could.

If they squint beneath the goggles, perhaps they can delude themself that they see it there; in the way the overhead lights cast a particular shadow on the curvature of his upper-lip.

He pulls another card from his hand and places it in his left-hand line. “Sold.”

Abruptly, Mara throws her remaining handful of cards onto the bedspread between them, making a muffled sound as she very clearly fights to stifle herself from letting out a yell of frustration. The domestic bat she keeps pokes its head out of her hood, apparently roused from slumber by the outburst.

"Quiet," Revenant drawls, lazily flicking his index finger in Bloodhound’s direction.

"Sorry," she whispers, nodding in acknowledgement.

Bloodhound continues to feign sleep, beneath the protective tint of the welding goggles. Their breaths rise, measured and slow, within a heavy chest.

The young girl takes a moment to center herself, and it’s a peculiar thing to watch. Her hands clench-and-unclench a number of times, and she closes her eyes as she draws in a deep inhale through her nose. Bloodhound nearly holds their breath alongside her, instinctively.

As she lets out a slow sigh through her mouth, Revenant’s voxcoder makes a noise that might be amusement at the whole ordeal, skeletal hands gathering up the cards with spider-like precision. Each pass brushes his knuckles against Bloodhound’s shin, their ankle, and the spaces between, muffled by the blanket that lies between them.

Little more than whispers of contact, but every touch sends a jolt of something foreign racing up the length of their legs; bounding and weaving between the branches of their capillaries, like frightened deer scattering into the trees.

It’s nearly distracting enough for them to miss what he says next:

"Dunno why I expected it to go different from every other time we do this, but– gotta say . . . gettin’ real tired of wiping the floor with you, kid."

Mara says nothing. Her face remains impassive as she seems to work on getting the last of her temper under control.

"What's that make it," he continues, eyes cutting up to look at her, "three– four times now, today? It was something like seven, last time."

Her eyes narrow, and Bloodhound can practically feel Revenant's self-satisfied grin.

"You suck at this," he says.

Most would bristle at the insult– because he truly means it as such, his tone makes that much clear. But she, marvelous and unknowable in her humors, brightens as one might with praise; her face breaks into a grin, like dawn cresting above the mountain peaks.

"Yeah," she pauses to loose an unbothered laugh from her chest, like starlings from the canopy, before continuing her thoughts, "I guess that’s a good thing, though! I mean– card games aren’t very useful for survival . . . it’d be pretty bad if I was good at something that wasn’t useful, huh?"

"Suppose so." He is indifferent in his agreement.

His hands have taken to mindlessly shuffling the cards, now that he's finished gathering them. Movements so fluid, it is difficult to imagine the metal frame of his body is capable of making them. Despite themself, Bloodhound must admit: it is fascinating to watch. It speaks towards decades of skill.

They wonder, briefly, if the simulacrum has–or had–any experience with stringed instruments.

The thought leaves as quickly as it arrives; it’s unnecessary to entertain the thing.

Outside of Bloodhound’s pointless wonderings, Mara seems to already know what's coming before it even happens. Before he speaks again, she is already gathering her things.

"Alright, beat it, skinbag. You're annoying me."

"Okay! I’ll keep practicing with that deck you gave me," she answers cheerily, slinging her backpack over one shoulder. "Maybe, if I practice enough, I can beat Mr. Witt . . . and then maybe one day I’ll beat you!"

His eyes do not track her to the door, and his hands never cease their endless shuffling. His only acknowledgement to her departing presence is a dismissive grunt, which she takes no offense to.

Bloodhound finds themself curious at the overlap of wild, arctic children and their ability to tolerate the most vitriolic simulacrum ever made.

"You got a problem?" He asks, without looking at them.

Unsurprising that he knew the moment they woke up. That they've been watching, this whole time.

With little point in hiding themself now, they stare; helpless and bewildered, like a trout caught in a fisher’s net. "Nei, I . . ." they start, and stop, and flounder, "I am just surprised, I suppose."

"'Bout what? Never seen a deck of cards before?" He lets out a decidedly unattractive ‘hmph,’ "Guess that’s not surprising. You’re just as sheltered as she is–"

"I would not have expected you to be so . . . gentle, with her of all people."

There is an audible ‘click’ that accompanies the movement of his optics, they move so quickly, bathing Bloodhound in a sickly and venomous glow. It is truly a deathwish, and such a foolish thing, for any living thing to bait his temper so openly while already injured and confined to a bed.

And, perhaps most frustratingly, they know that it is foolish.

But there is something about this hateful and joyless machine that resurrects the last withered remains of the arrogant and reckless child that Bloodhound used to be, standing at the bottom steps of their Uncle’s home–their home, now.

Revenant is necrotic in nature; rotting and rebirthing himself in an endless cycle, and bringing all of the most unlikable parts of Bloodhound with him.

It’s an affect he seems to have on anyone who spends too much time in his presence. They regress, unflatteringly, and become trapped in the same endless loop of bad behavior.

But he can do nothing to punish Bloodhound for such a bold attack on his character, no matter how much he very clearly desires to, in that moment.

The growl thundering deep from within his chassis proves as much.

He snaps his cards back into an orderly stack with one, precise movement. Bloodhound imagines he might very much enjoy doing the same motion to the fragile vertebrae of their neck. "I ain't gentle. It was just a stupid game of Caravan so she'd shut up and leave me alone. Don’t get it twisted."

He returns the deck of cards to the satchel on his chest that he seems to most oft keep it in, with entirely more force than necessary, and then he snaps the thing shut, as if to punctuate the end of his deflections with the noise.

Bloodhound hums, amused and unconvinced. "She bothers you often?"

"Often enough," he admits.

“I see.”

"She heard Witt crying about how he thinks I’m gonna eat him, and she did that thing of hers where she takes everything completely fuckin’ literal and said that wasn’t possible because m̴̊_̶mac̷hines can’t eat," his tone paints itself with the inflection of mockery, and they can hear the curl of his lip as he sneers.

Bloodhound has to physically restrain themself from letting out a snort of amusement.

“Is that so.”

“Yeah. It is. Silver dared her to talk to me, after that. Think he was hoping I’d terrify her, like Witt. She hasn't left me alone, since."

"I was . . . unaware she understood the concept of a dare."

The entire situation should not be nearly as amusing as they find it.

It must be the medication, they reason.

"She doesn't," Revenant folds his arms behind his head, leaning his chair perilously back on two legs, "she thinks we actually get along."

His legs are still propped up on their bed, near enough that their feet occasionally bump against one another as he begins to jitter his foot to an uneven and irritated tempo.

"And so you play card games to dissuade her from this delusion." It's not a question.

"Shut up," Revenant snaps, letting the chair drop heavily back onto all fours. They feel the vibration up through their bed. ”I didn't ask for your input.“

“You gifted her a deck of her own to practice with.”

“I/I/̴I m̸e̷_e̵a̷nn it̵–”

“You play together often enough that this has become routine for her . . .”

“S_s̵̀/̵́/̴Sh̴͕͠u̸t.̶ U̸p|̸p.” He snarls, sharpened fingertips digging into their matress as he leans forward threateningly, “God you’re fucking annoying sometimes, you know that? No wonder they stt_itched your damn mouth shut.”

“Where were you?”

“Depends,” he says. “What’re you interrogating me for?”

Bloodhound has not budged an inch, for all that his guttural hissing and antagonistic posturing roused their instincts; old and hard-learned knowledge telling them to put distance between the two of them. They will not give his prey drive the satisfaction of their back foot.

They will not give their long-buried phobias the shovel of his absence as an escape, nor an excuse to return to torment them.

The lack of him has dug at them in such a way, but they will not allow it to dig these insecurities free of where Bloodhound has purposefully laid them to rest.

It was just a dream, they know now.

And he wore the wrong face, besides.

“Earlier. I did not see you, when I was collected,” they say.

“Not allowed in,” he tells them, “m//̵ac̸hin̵ery messes with the equipment. Wasn’t far, though. Close enough to hear your whining.”

“I did not whine–”

“Hvar er vél,” their own voice plays back to them from somewhere in the space between his chest and his throat, distant and slightly muffled, compressed by the recording.

“Like I said: whining,” he says, as a way of declaring victory.

“Enough,” they sigh, lifting their good hand to massage the space just above and between their eyebrows. “I have a favor, if you will cease your crowing long enough to hear it.”

“Sure. I’m listening.”

Chapter Text

He is tapping his fingers impatiently against his upper-arm. It plays out the familiar tune of his annoyance, and they know this melody by heart–just as innately as the Eddas.

A minute ticks by, measured only by the persistent beeping of the monitor that tracks every thud of their heavy heart. The bellows of the more advanced ventilator push-and-pull lethargically as it filters oxygen through the tube running between their nostrils.

Revenant’s system flushes steam through the slits of his concave nose in rhythm with a ventilator pulse. A synthetic breath, shared between he and they.

Bloodhound is still massaging the plane of skin between their brows and wondering how best to begin, when he snaps, “you gonna tell me, or what?”

“A moment, please–”

“Hurry it up, I don’t got all day.”

This is untrue, they know.

His only occupation is to sit and play jailor to them. To loiter and do nothing but wait as their body does as all human bodies were born to do, and knit itself slowly back together again. Bloodhound will mend, and he will be lavished with enough wealth to last several lifetimes as a reward for watching it happen, and he will not share a cent of it.

Every bitter pulse of their heart causes that building ache against their skull to drill a little deeper into the bone. Their good hand has begun to shake, jittering against their forehead as they fail to quell the discomfort. They are starting to feel nauseous.

He sighs, overloud, and they feel the weight of his legs lift away from the bed as he lowers them to the floor.

“It’s too bright in here for you,” he says.

They cannot even begin to question him in the time that it takes for him to cross the room, in one long stride of his legs, before he is already at the light adjustment on the wall by the door.

He fiddles, momentarily, with the settings. “Takes time to adjust,” he says, with too much knowing.

The blinding fluorescence overhead dims slowly; not to complete darkness, but something softer. Something more easily stomached by their over-sensitive eyes.

Everything has felt like too much since they awoke from surgery, and they had not even realized.

Like malicious imitations of the fireflies they once coveted and bottled in the summer solstice of their youth, his optics drift closer through the din.

Those days feel so far away now, as if they happened eons ago. Another life, another person.

“Once took me three months to get used to sunlight again,” he says, and they feel the weight of his heels returning to roost upon their bed. The toe of his foot knocks lightly against the sole of their foot, on their good leg. “Could only take showers for a year, another time. Couldn’t even look at a tub.”

“After your first death?”

They ask without thinking. Too drowsy from the medication, and too cantankerous from overstimulation to stop and think better of confronting such a sore and elusive subject. Few acknowledged it, and even fewer spoke of it.

His eyes snap to meet theirs with an audible ‘click,’ the moment the words leave their mouth.

It takes a great effort to keep their heart rate under control, but he would not need to look at the rising numbers on the monitor attached to their pulse to read their anxiety. If he wanted to, he could see it well enough in the way their temperature ticks a few degrees higher, on his personal HUD sensors.

Their face, at least, betrays nothing.

“Forgot you’re a bookworm,” he says, after a period of silence.

They let out a breath they didn’t realize they were holding.

“Didja read the whole thing? Or just enough to make sure the MRVIN got your good side?” He asks, not truly expecting an answer. They do not give him one.

He studies them, not affected by the low light of the room. One arm in a sling, one leg elevated and still stinking of surgical antiseptic, and flesh that is more bruise than not. Stitches, bandage wraps, and enough tubes to rival his own internal configurations. How pathetic they must look, to him.

Perhaps that is why he so freely shares these memories; it is out of pity.

From a machine((demon))person who does not understand the meaning of the word?

Their uncle’s voice blends with their own blends with that of Andrade, in their mind.

After a moment of his quiet evaluation of them, he continues. Though there is a slower cadence to his usual drawl, as if he is weighing exactly how honest he wants to be. “Obviously didn’t know that until the programming broke.” He picks at a loose splinter in the wooden arm of his bedside chair until it is pulled free, only to then flick the piece across the room as a way of venting his frustration.

“Don’t remember what it told me to explain the fear,” he says, “don’t suppose it really matters. It was almost four-hundred years ago. Had a lotta deaths since then.”

“I am sorry,” they say, and they mean it. Horrible and brutal and malicious as he can be, he is sympathetic also. What a terrible person he is, and what a terrible thing that has been done to him. But this sentiment from them only stands to incense him further.

“You g/̸̇g̶/̷̨̅/̶͖̋o̴͓͝n̴͚͝n̵a t_el̸l̶ m̴e ̴[wh]at the hell it is [y]o̸u ̶_̴w̶a̵|̸|̶n̵t̵,̵ or̴ n̸ot[?]” He snaps with so much emphasis between the warbling and flickering of his voxcoder, they almost believe they can hear the clicking of teeth biting down around every syllable.

They sigh, and it is strange to hear without the interference of their personal ventilator that turns their breath to static.

“Very well.”

The deviation in topic had been unintentional, for all that it must have looked like stalling. Once again, Bloodhound found themself quietly frustrated at how clouded the medication made their mind.

“I know you were unable to locate my belongings at the–” they pause, the words automatically becoming lodged in their throat. And that– it surprises them. So few times in their life has fear physically kept them from speaking.

But something dark and sickly grabs hold of them with a bone-deep terror, and when they try to force out the word once more, it squeezes down around their throat in a paralyzing grip. Their throat clicks, and their voice is choked out entirely.

Like a python in a death coil; the more they struggle, the tighter the vice becomes.

“Where . . . where you found me,” they say, accepting that the word ‘warehouse’ simply will not vocalize. They feel cold; the sort of chill that comes from sitting on concrete for hours–days, months–with no exposure to sunlight. No warmth. A shudder runs through them, but they continue as if nothing is amiss.

He does not remark on any of it, any of their oddities, for all that his eyes have not left them. But he is cataloging something– he must be, for his hands have gone completely still.

“But I worry; my technology is unique. Powerful. If such tools should fall into the wrong hands– I . . . I do not wish to think about it.”

The thought of Hammond mass-producing their very own army of berserkers made Bloodhound’s painfully empty stomach begin to curdle.

Syndicate reps had contacted Bloodhound about their tech, in the past; not long after they had first joined the games. Plastic smiles and innocuous questions did a poor job of concealing that hunger for even the smallest look at their schematics. The interest was there, still, even after Bloodhound’s initial refusal.

“So you want me to go on a wild goose chase to find your shit, is that it?”

They choose, instead, to speak the one language he seems capable of understanding. “I would like to hire you to retrieve my things, yes.”

Revenant grunts out a laugh, mirthless and patronizing, and he sneers, “Think you can afford me?”

“I know I cannot.”

“I don’t do cha–”

They cut him off before he can finish the refusal. Their voice does not raise, but comes with a bite sharp enough to quell him. “I am not asking you to work for free. I am willingly indebting myself to you. I will owe you any favor of your choosing.”

Silence hangs between them like a noose, for the duration of a ventilator pump’s rise-and-fall. Then two.

On the third, he says, “That’s a dangerous bargain to make, Hound. Not many people’d be stupid enough to owe me favors.”

“I am not stupid,” they snap. The stitches at the corners of their mouth pull uncomfortably from the way their sharpened teeth bare themselves to him.

It does nothing to deter him, and only stands to invite more of his perverse amusement.

He chuckles. “Guess we’ll see.”

They feel that noose snap tight around their throat.

Unnecessarily, he scratches at his jawline, chasing a phantom itch. A blip of human behavior in an endless systemic sea of binary. Was it residuals; interference made by the organic source that tethered him? Or was it programmed, they wonder?

How much of what he did was him, and how much was what Hammond made of him?

“Risky, though,” he is still speaking. “Can’t be two places at once, no matter how many bodies I got lyin’ around. You’ll be on your own while I’m off looking for your shit . . . that’s a looot of money I could lose, if something happens while I’m gone.”

“Should I be insulted that you think me so helpless? Or should I be flattered that you seem to care so deeply?”

“Feel however you want,” he scoffs. “Just don’t wanna hear about it when you start crying again ‘cause I’m not here.”

They temper themself, barely, by clenching-and-unclenching their good hand into as tight a fist as they can manage. Of course he would belittle them in this, their one human failing. They have cried so scarcely in their life, for all that Grief seems to shadow them like a faithful hound.

Now, they admonish their body for the effort wasted on him.

“I am certain I will manage. Are you accepting my offer or not?” They take care to keep their tone level, and free of the building contempt. But they are sure he knows, regardless. It was his aim, after all, and seldom does he ever miss his shot.

“Yeah, sure.” The way he says it, so flippantly, as if he never planned to deny them at all– Bloodhound has to bite down on the inside of their cheek. The world tastes of copper, and their ever-persistent nausea swells so rapidly, they must spend all of their effort on not vomiting.

Their ire with him is gone instantly.

And, at the same time, it has never been more present. A constant, tireless beeping on a monitor screen. Intravenous needles twisting within their arteries and grating against the endothelium.

Carnivorous worms beneath their skin.

When he stands, he seems to hesitate just before heading towards the door. “Here,” he says, picking up the communication device that connects them to the medical staff–mainly Ajay Che–and allows them to call for aid.

He does something to it. Opens a port and produces a cable from somewhere on his body. Bloodhound is so focused on the acidic burn clawing at the back of their throat–breathe in, hold, breathe out, and again–that they do not know the exact process of his machinations.

He has connected his cable directly into the auxiliary jack nested into the side of the device. His fingers type rapidly across the digital keyboard, quicker and with more precision than any human could replicate. A long and complicated string of numbers, which they can barely recall six of before the screen is cleared and the device chirps its confirmation.

Do not swallow, they tell themself. Breathe. Slowly, in and then out again. Slow.

He tosses the device back onto their bed without ceremony. “Direct com line,” he explains. “Emergency only. Don’t ping me for stupid shit. Got it?”

They give a curt nod of their head.

He leaves with a grunt, unbothered by their sudden silence.

The moment the door slides shut behind him, Bloodhound grabs the trashcan beside their bed and retches into it. Nothing beyond bile and bloody spittle comes up. But it does not stop their tortured stomach from trying; violently heaving and trying so desperately to purge itself–of the taste, and of the memories.

The room is so nauseatingly silent without him. It smells too clean. The side where he had been is painfully cold. Their head aches and swims, as the last vestiges of anesthesia from surgery begins to wane as their body comes awake with all its many pains and complaints.

They wish they had a book to read.

They wish they had not sent him away.

“It is necessary,” they rasp to no one but themself, blood and drool running in tandem with the cryo-scarring on their chin. “Ósterkligr.”

They could ease their own discomfort. They could pass the time more quickly, simply by calling for another dose of painkillers. But why should they bury their head in the sand, when instead they could temper themself and use this malaise to strengthen their own pitiful resolve?

They burrow beneath the scratchy, thin blankets they have been afforded, and they wait to sink once more into ginnung’s embrace.

The shadows are hot, cloying, and oppressive. But there is no faster way to travel. And– well, he was built for it, after all.

There are flickers; distant echos of who he’s looking for. She is loud enough, overly conspicuous enough in urban settings, that it takes little effort to find her.

It takes more effort to peel himself out of the shadowy depths he crawls through, like a bottom feeder through silt.

She hadn’t gotten far, after their earlier card match; Mara sits in the orbital station’s community center, at the bar, whittling away at whatever pointless sculpture she’s fixated on.

But–annoyingly–she isn’t alone. A few of the Legends have gathered here . . . passing time between the games, or waiting on further news of Hound’s condition. He doesn’t care which.

Their concerns are as meaningless as their presence.

It’s only one Legend in particular that irks him to see. And he knows the feeling is mutual.

Andrade snarls, bearing her teeth and snapping some gutless remark that he chooses not to hear as Revenant strides arrogantly past her. That he barely acknowledges her outside of one, pointed glance in her direction seems to infuriate her even more.

Good. That was the point.

By now, the other Legends have turned to look, drawn by the smell of him and by Andrade’s blowharding. Some of them, he can see, expect news. They’ve come to see him as Hound’s harbinger.

And with the way he’s been blocking the door to every pathetic meatbag who came knocking in the last week, he can’t exactly blame them.

“Kid,” he says, and Mara instinctively looks. “Grab your shit. We’re going on a hunt.”

“Okay!” She practically chirps, all grins and bright demeanor as she gathers up what little she has. “Where are we going? Should I bring a day bag? Oh– or maybe–”

“Less questions, more packing.”

“Got it . . . it’s time sensitive.” She nods her understanding.

What he doesn’t understand is how . . . unbothered she is by all his bitching and snapping. Never once does she seem to take offense to his foul moods. She barely notices them, half the time. And even Hound, who’s more patient than most by far, has their limits before they eventually bite right back at him.

He’s not the only one confused.

“Ugh, honestly, Mara,” Loba sneers from across the room. And there she goes, using that sickeningly false doe-eyed look of concern, trying to fool all the morons around her and make people think that she actually cares.

“Stay away from him. The demonio is evil . . . he only cares about himself, and he is going to get you killed.” She says it as if she actually gives a good god damn whether the kid lives or dies. It’s almost impressive.

But it stops Mara in her tracks, right in the middle of stuffing some thing into her bag.

He’d almost take it for her coming to her senses, and agreeing with Loba’s warning. Except he sees the crease between her brows, and he knows it’s the one she always gets when she’s spotted a fatal flaw.

A weak spot for a killing blow.

“I mean . . . you only care about yourself. So, by that logic, shouldn’t I stay away from you?”

Loba recoils with same sort of open shock as someone who hadn’t expected the wild animal they’d been hand-feeding to suddenly develop a taste for flesh.

“I am nothing like him,” she wails with all the same grace as a pampered housecat fighting its own reflection, “I look after my friends . . . I take care of the people I love! He does not know the meaning of the word! He murdered my parents!”

“That’s sad, but . . . you’ve murdered a lot of people. We all do. It’s kind of our job. I’m sure all those people had families, too,” Mara’s voice is that unforgiving tone of rational that had initially caught Revenant so off-guard.

The kid could be fucking brutal, when she wanted to. And it seemed like right now, she absolutely wanted to.

“And, besides . . . weren’t your parents, like– wanted criminals? Pretty sure I remember reading about them being thieves or something. So, they probably killed people too. I mean– at least, I’ve never heard of someone becoming a crime boss without killing people before.”

And, oh . . . that is delicious.

The mixed look of pure outrage and mortification on Andrade’s face almost makes losing his head worth it.

And best of all, Mara doesn’t even care.

Loba looks damn near ready to spontaneously combust, and the kid just carries on like she’s talking about the weather.

“I’m just saying . . . yeah, he’s evil or whatever, but you’re not exactly good. And you’re not very nice, either.” Mara says, from somewhere near his elbow. He’s too busy staring at Loba and recording every single expression that crosses her face.

Next time he starts feeling too sore about his missing head, he’ll replay this clip to keep himself warm at night.

“Yeah, at least Rojo doesn’t pretend to like you, just to get stuff. He doesn’t like anyone!” Octavio chimes in, next to his other elbow. “Speaking of . . . mira, where are we going?”

Revenant sighs, and it takes everything in him not to throw Octavio across the room. He’d only find it entertaining. “The kid and I are going on a job, Silver,” he answers flatly. “One that requires stealth.”

Without looking, Revenant hears the telling jitter of Octavio’s restlessness; the hiss of the pistons in his legs as he bounces anxiously from foot-to-foot, the whine of the shock-absorbant coils in his heels, the creaking of the joint plates that haven’t been oiled in–likely–months.

Noisy. Impatient. A giant walking liability, where Revenant could not afford to fail.

“Oh, come on,” the thrillseeker whines, “I can be stealthy! I’m totally stealthy, I’m like– practically invisible. I can totally help! Please, I’m so bored here!”

Revenant tried to ignore him; he started towards the door with Mara quietly in tow, but Octavio continued to hop, skip, and prattle after them.

With a snarl, the sim spun on his heel to tower over the insufferable little halfsuit. “You wanna help–”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah! C’mon, tell me!”

“--make sure no one gets in or out of that room, except the docs. Got that?”

“Got it!”

There comes the familiar sound of Stim milliseconds before the familiar burst of speed, and Octavio barrels right between Revenant and Mara, shouldering them both out of the way as he tears out the door and quickly out of sight.

“He’s . . . noisy.”

To her credit, that’s all the kid says as she trails along behind him. Whatever occupies her, he doesn’t care to know; he’s only happy it keeps her quiet.

At least, until he finds a dark enough alley for them to squeeze themselves into, and his shadows start to grow. “Aw, man . . .” she groans under her breath, watching the darkest corners deepen into that familiar pit of nothingness, “. . . these things stink.”

Revenant grunts in amusement and, with a firm shove to her shoulder, he sends her through first.

Chapter Text

Their first stop is a weapons cache. One of many that he has squirreled away, scattered buckshot across the Outlands.

Mara, once again to her credit, doesn’t ask questions.

Though, that doesn’t mean she’s completely without commentary.

“Wow!” Her eyes are wide and wondrous as she peruses through this small collection of his arsenal. “I wish I had this many weapons back home! It’d make hunting so much easier.”

Revenant grunts, noncommittal, and steers her towards the gathering pool of shadows, once they have what they need. She complains, same as before. He ignores her and shoves her through, same as before.

A trail of bread crumbs leads them from one empty warehouse to another; recently cleared out and abandoned. Whoever these people are, they’re never stationary for long.

Two busts in a row, and he’s banking on a third.

But he’s pleasantly surprised . . . it’s empty of anything of any real value, but there’s still skinbags hanging around, at least. Lazy, unprepared, incompetent. And that means there’s still information, at least.

And a learning opportunity for the kid.

They won’t expect it, he had said, close range.

Any idiot who’s watched the games for five minutes knows you’re a sniper.

Use that against them.

It’d been entertaining, watching Mara bull-rush the guy with all the confidence of someone who doesn’t quite understand that her respawn chips are no good outside of the games. But he’s not about to tell her that. She’ll figure it out on her own, one way or another.

Still, the grunt has no idea how to handle her; is completely thrown by the fact that she’s not scoping him out at a distance. So he scrambles for his gun, but the kid’s faster. She gets the barrel of her Peacekeeper wedged up against the soft spot under his chin before his hand fully makes it to his holster.

“Surprise! You’re safe nowhere,” she chirps, overbright.

Grunt stares up at her, confused. Bewildered. Doesn’t know whether he wants to start spitting insults or asking questions. She doesn’t give him an opportunity for either before she starts prattling on again.

“Are you afraid of the dark? Most people are. Or, that’s what Mister Revenant tells me, anyways.”

Slowly, the grunt’s eyes look over her shoulder.

Revenant had been keeping to the shadows; keeping enough of a distance to let the kid do her work, but close enough to step in if need be. But now . . . now, he looms just behind her. The kid’s not small, but that doesn’t mean much. Most skinbags are dwarfed by him, comparatively. And he delights in the way the grunt’s eyes are forced to travel up, up, and up, until finally they lock onto the sim’s gilded optics.

Revenant knows his presence makes things infinitely more complicated. And dangerous. His favorite combination.

Mara could be delt with easily enough, on her own. But with him?

The grunt’s hand barely twitches towards the walkie at his hip.

“Stop him,” Revenant says.

“Oh, sorry!” Mara presses the trigger in to the halfway point, and her Peacekeeper whines; the barrel widening and charging for a choked fire. Immediately, he grunt’s hands lift in surrender.

“I can’t let you do that,” she explains, unnecessarily, “see . . . Mister Revenant’s trying to teach me how to be stealthy around humans, and you calling for help would kind of ruin that.”

“Enough talk,” Revenant growls, “just get it done with. Quietly.”

He sinks into her shadow. Unseen, but not absent. He monitors the way she cuts the guy’s throat with a cold efficiency. And that’s one of the things he appreciates . . . he’s never had to give her the lecture of ‘them or you,’ or explain that her enemies won’t hesitate and contemplate human morality. She already knows.

Mom raising her in the Fringes did a good enough job of that, he supposes.

He watches her clean her knife, clean up her evidence. No trail left behind. Trails attract predators. But then she casts around, looking for direction, and skips off in the direction she thinks is best. And it’s curious, watching her.

The kid was . . . well, she wasn’t clueless. Just dense. Something like that. He can’t really make sense of it.

Her brain’s just wired differently, someone had said.

Wired.

She’s not programmed to think like that.

Programmed.

The way they all talked about her, you’d think she was running around in a body made of bolts and gears, like him. Sometimes he wondered.

“I don’t smell anyone else out here,” she says, “they must all be inside.”

He grunts his acknowledgement.

Little shit went over her head often enough; simple social cues that he learned when he was half her age. He’d chalk it up to her being half-feral, but then she’d turn around and say something smart enough that every meatsuit in the room– except maybe Park and Nox– would start scratching their heads.

He hates her just about as much as every other skinbag. But she confused the shit out of him, and that was interesting, at least.

“I’ll scout ahead,” he says, smoke and shadows crawling across the rooftop ledge they find themselves on. “Stay here.”

She’d already sat herself and started cleaning her weapons before he fully got the order out.

He’d roll his eyes, if this form were corporeal.

Not like it mattered much, anyways.

He’s barely made it through the darkest cracks in the ceiling when a notification pings across his HUD.

HALFSUIT ≪Octavio.Silva≫ 00:45:26
[ Rojo, we got trouble. ]

≪XAC.617≫ REV 00:45:27
[ what. ]

HALFSUIT ≪Octavio.Silva≫ 00:59:45
[ I heard Fuse talking about wanting to see Bloodhound. And remember how I said I’m super stealthy??? Well I followed him! And then I asked him where he was going. ]

≪XAC.617≫ REV 01:00:02
[ get to the point, Silver. ]

HALFSUIT ≪Octavio.Silva≫ 01:01:34
[ Mira, he said he was just going to visit a friend . . . I think Bloodhound is the friend!! ]

≪XAC.617≫ REV 01:01:36
[ yeah, no shit. ]

HALFSUIT ≪Octavio.Silva≫ 01:03:12
[ I TOLD you I could be helpful! ]

≪XAC.617≫ REV 01:03:13
[ i’ll be sure to pick up a gold medal for mediocracy on my way back. ]

HALFSUIT ≪Octavio.Silva≫ 01:04:33
[ Gracias, hermano. I’ll be sure to put it with all the others from pops. ]

Chapter Text

Quiet, clean, and sterile.

Not a collection of words that any sane person would use to describe Walter ‘Fuse’ Fitzroy. But it’s the first thing he notices as he steps out of the elevator that brought him up from the lobby.

This entire wing of the hospital is a bloody ghost town; makes it difficult not to notice the little things that normally get lost in the bustle of medical staff, emotional visitors, and other such commotion. Very definition of ‘lights are on, but nobody’s home.’

It’s damn eerie. And he doesn’t know what makes it worse: the lack of people, or the lack of Revenant.

He knows it’s risky, but this singular moment was a golden opportunity that he simply couldn’t pass up. The moment that he’d heard Revenant was off-station, Fuse had made quick work on capitalizing on this brief window. The nest is finally empty; he’ll never get a better chance.

It doesn’t stop the overwhelming feeling of ‘you shouldn’t be here’ from rattling around inside his skull, with every step he takes down the desolate hallway. This was about as far as he’d gotten, every other time he tried to visit, before the bloodthirsty sim’d materialize out of the air and turn him away.

He feels like he’s being watched.

He half-expects Hound’s door to be rigged to explode, should anyone other than Revenant touch it.

But . . . nothing happens.

It slides open, silent as the rest of the hall, and Fuse subconsciously holds his breath.

Cautiously, he glances around the room, paranoid; worried that maybe his intel had been wrong, and he was walking face-first into a death trap.

But the room only contains dim lights, a gentle choir of medical machinery, a tuft of burgundy hair peeking out from the mound of blankets, and not a speck of glowing gold in sight.

He’s careful not to disturb the quiet as he slips across the threshold, past the door. He’s patient; he’s happy to sit and wait for Hound to wake up, no need to disturb their sleep. And– who knows, maybe they’ll even appreciate the company. Especially after so long of being isolated from the world . . . that’s gotta do wonders on the mind.

Adjusting his grip on the present he brought along – a book, personally wrapped – Fuse only makes it so far as one step.

The shadows in the corner curl into wisps of black smoke as he passes.

Malicious clouds peel themselves away from the wall, drifting to form a towering pillar just behind him. A singular, telling arc of electricity illuminates his peripheral; a nauseatingly familiar flash of orange. It’s his only warning as the familiar shape coalesced out of the gloom.

In one terrifying blink, Revenant appears. A harsh wall of metal pressed firmly against his back.

A skeletal hand closes down around Fuse’s mouth at the moment of Revenant’s apparition, and his heart-rate spikes involuntarily– despite his best efforts to stifle any reaction from the horrifyingly perceptive sim. The bastard caught it regardless, he knew.

There’s just enough of a pause after Revenant materializes that Fuse knows he’s actively weighing whether he wants to snap Walter’s neck now, or later.

Seems he can’t decide.

“I could kill you, y’know . . .” Revenant’s voice is practically a whisper, his unmoving mouth uncomfortably close to Fuse’s ear. He’s purposefully keeping himself on Fuse’s blind side.

“Could snap your neck, right here ‘n‘ now, and no one’d have any idea. They’d never find the body. Wouldn’t even think to look for one.”

Fuse feels another spider-like hand crawling its way over and across his shoulder, getting far too close for comfort to his neck.

“Why are you in here,” Revenant hisses, the tone so poisonous it could honestly give Caustic’s traps a run for their money.

The sim starts to lift his hand, slowly, and Fuse starts to open his mouth. But whatever had been about to come out is quickly interrupted by one more viperous threat:

“Whisper,” Revenant interrupts, before Fuse can even take a breath, “or I’ll rip out your tongue.”

“How’s about we take this outside, hey?”

It’s so much of a whisper, it’s nearly soundless.

There’s a moment of tension as Revenant seems to weigh the decision; the glow of his eyes shifts, and Fuse pieces together pretty quickly - even with his piss poor vision - that he’s glancing at Bloodhound’s sleeping form. He can’t even begin to fathom what for. What might possibly be going through the simulacrum’s mind.

It’s an uncomfortably long wait, but Fuse is patient.

Eventually, Revenant relents. He straightens himself out of the threatening curl that he had shaped around Fuse, and gestures rather benignly towards the door. But Walter Fitzroy is nothing if not capricious. And so he makes it a point to hold eye-contact with the murderous hunk of machinery as he crept forward, leaving his present lying at the foot of Bloodhound’s bed.

This act of defiance earns him the sight of Revenant’s hands slowly clenching into fists, and his shoulder pauldrons flexing apart and back together.

Revenant’s refusal to wake Hound is the only reason Fuse isn’t a splatter on the wall right now, he knows.

But it also means that he’s actively thinking of all the ways he can shorten Fuse’s lifespan, in exceedingly creative methods, at the first available opportunity. Little victories, Fuse supposes . . .

The moment they step into the hall and the door slides closed behind them, the light in the hall is swallowed by seven feet of murderous intent.

“Gonna tell me why you’re skulking around here now?”

“Came to see my friend,” Fuse answers, unafraid to stand his ground now that Revenant no longer has the element of surprise. “What’s your excuse, ya wispy cunt? Mind tellin’ me why they can’t seem to have a moment to themself without you havin’ a bloody fit, anytime someone comes to pay ‘em a visit?”

Revenant tilts his head slowly, eyes burning like two insufferably arrogant floodlights in the din. “Jealous?” There’s an audible smirk in his tone; perfectly conveying his smug amusement in the way that his immobile face couldn’t.

“Not on your life, mate– any one thousand of ‘em.”

It’s a sensitive nerve, Fuse knows, and a dangerous thing to poke at. But he’s made a profession out of poking dangerous live-wires. This is just another to the bunch.

That fact doesn’t stop the prickle of instinctual fear at the back of his neck when Revenant straightens to his full height. Slowly, as if he wants to make sure Fuse catalogs every single inch that the sim gains over him. Fuse feels his head tipping further and further back to compensate – which only bares his neck further, and makes it a bigger target, something in the back of his brain notes helpfully.

The shadows in the hall seem to grow, swallowing up the pitiful fluorescent bulb above them all the more. Fuse finds it difficult to look anywhere but Revenant’s glowing optics.

A dangerous thing, when trapped alone with a simulacrum who can turn his hands into knives on a whim– faster than most human eyes can process.

“You think you’re clever,” Revenant drawls, and it’s not a question. Neither is it a compliment. “Blood seems to like you, for whatever reason.”

“Could say the same about you,” Fuse counters, “at least I care about people. You don’t care about anyone, not even yourself.”

Revenant says nothing. An admission all it’s own.

“So I’m not quite gettin’ what this whole . . . guard demon act is about. Y’don’t really care about them, so why’re ya actin’ like it? It’s cruel, even for you; makin’ ‘em think you actually give a damn.”

“You don’t know anything–”

“I know one thing: I’m not gonna let you hurt my friend like that,” Fuse warns, shoving his finger against Revenant’s chest piece. “An’ you’re not gonna keep me from seein’ ‘em either, cunt.”

Seconds stretch into an eternity, and the fleeting silence feels like a decade. Revenant stares, unblinking, and Fuse wonders if he should start saying his Hail Marys now, or–

“Fine.” Revenant slowly leans forward, putting his face uncomfortably close to Fuse’s, and the demoliton’s expert has to remind himself that the sim’s face is welded shut; he’s not in danger of a bite. This time.

“But you visit when they’re awake, or not at all.”

“Oh yeah? And what gives you special privilege to skulk around while they’re sleepin’, ya big whingy bastard?”

“Because they asked me to,” is his answer.

It sounds too much like gloating.

“Bullshit,” Fuse scoffs.

It’s just too unthinkable; that anyone would request Revenant’s presence while they slept. Least of all Hound, who seemed to carry a distrustful exasperation for the sim, most days.

“Believe what you want,” Revenant drawls, rolling his shoulders in what might be a half-shrug. “You left your little gift, made your little threats. Now I’m bored . . . so get out.”

“Yeah, I suppose you must be, hey . . .” Fuse rolls his own shoulders. He knows full-well that he should stop while he’s ahead, but he simply can’t resist the opportunity. “Got a lot of time on your hands these days, and not much to do with it. How’s that goin’ for ya, by the way? Losin’ your h–”

The attack is telegraphed seconds before it happens; an irate and guttural bellowing, his arm lifting in an arc above their heads. It’s just enough for Fuse to dodge out of the way as the sim’s claws cut scythe-like through the space where Fuse’s head had just been.

Five elongated digits of sharpened tungsten gouge into the wall behind him; carving through sheet metal as if it’s made of butter.

Golden optics burn molten with his fury, and Revenant is gearing up for a second swipe–

“Revenant?”

Bloodhound’s voice is faint through the closed door.

Immediately, Fuse thinks of frightened children who call out in the night for a source of comfort; it’s a fragile and uncertain thing. He’s never heard them so uneasy– at least, not as far as he can remember.

Revenant freezes immediately at the sound, the intensity of his optics wavering as he glances over his shoulder. Before Fuse can think of anything to say – witty or otherwise – he blinks his remaining eye and the hallway before him is empty.

The sound of Hound’s door sliding shut is the only indicator that the sim had even been there at all, and not just some horrifying figment of Fuse’s imagination.

Against his better judgment, he decides to eavesdrop – just for a moment.

“What’s wrong,” Revenant’s tone is gruff. He’s pretending to be annoyed by the summons.

“I thought I heard something,” Hound answers, unbothered by his grousing. “It sounded– well, I was not sure if I had heard you.”

“Oh, yeah. That. Just stubbed my toe outside is all.”

Fuse glances back to the distinct claw marks in the wall, eye-level with where his head currently sat between his shoulders.

But this . . . he balks at what he hears; Revenant is– well, he’s joking, in his own way. And, confusing him further, Hound laughs. It’s a small thing, but it’s there all the same. And he can’t help but wonder: what the hell happened?

Their conversation continues, but Fuse has heard enough. He leaves, quiet as he had arrived.

He’s not jealous, that much had been true when Revenant accused him of such; jealous implies any sort of ownership to be jealous of losing. Bloodhound is Fuse’s very good friend, but he isn’t owed that friendship– and he certainly doesn’t have the monopoly on it, either.

Really, he’s just flat-out confused.

Something he thought was impossible is apparently not only very possible, but actively happening behind a specific closed door.

Revenant cares about someone . . . or so it seems.

Chapter Text

The window is open, and here they catch wisps of Haust’s distinctive fragrance on the wind; the rot of leaves, the soil made fat and rich by minerals drawn up by the encroaching rains, the wheat grains and gourds plucked from their stalks. Of a planet preparing to hibernate. Their mother would cook with a foreign spice, here, at this turning of the season.

Their throat clogs with the desire to call out for her.

Their mouth is sewn shut.

“No,” a voice answers this thought. “Your threads were cut. But what of that thing out there?”

Their uncle’s voice, beside them inexplicably. They cannot turn their head– cannot move. Their eyes remain locked firmly onto the treeline through the window. Pine and cedar sway, like metronomes, in the windsong. Their uncle is also looking through the sill, they know.

“Will you be the one? To cut its threads?”

You are dead, they think, mournful at the sound of this long-gone voice beside them.

“Perhaps, once before. Perhaps even still. Or . . . perhaps something in-between. Are you?”

What do you mean?

“Are you the one–”

The trees outside swing with unnatural severity. Surely, they will snap themselves in half at this rate. The breeze floating in through the open sill is a gentle thing, and it carries petrichor in a silken cradle. The cedars rake like clawed fingertips against the sky.

“Are you the one who will carry the bowl?”

They cannot move. The threads between their lips cinch tighter, and it is difficult to breathe.

Beyond the treeline echoes an agonizing howl, metallic and molten in its fury.

Their uncle’s hand rests heavy against the back of their neck, like a noose, and smoke skirts their body as it fills the room and flees the open sill. Their back is overhot as the flames grow closer, but they still cannot move; their body is paralyzed, here, condemned to do nothing but stand and watch.

A tree falls, in the woods. Smoke floods their periphery, and it stings at their eye like needles.

They cannot breathe.

They cannot breathe.

There is too much smoke.

They cannot breathe.

A deafening crash, as the trunk of the tree meets the rotting earth, and Bloodhound jolts back into their hospital bed.

“Revenant?”

The word– name– leaves their un-sutured mouth before their mind is even fully conscious of it. An instinctive thing. A reach for a comfort they were previously unaware of.

They wait, in the interim. Claustrophobic silence stuffs up the room, making everything overhot and unbearable. Faces flicker and meld in ghostly afterimages across their retinas . . . faces they haven’t seen in decades now warping into one, coming back to look at them through the glass of their borrowed welding goggles.

Their head feels overheavy and unsteady upon the pillar of their neck.

A gentle arhythmic ticking beats against the window.

Does it rain, here, so high above the clouds? No . . . it is– these are just more of Hammond’s clever innovations. Synthetic weather patterns upon Syndicate orbital cities. Enrichment for their worker drones and their lab mice. Little miracles to break up the monotonies. To keep their conscripted employees from festering– Zoochosis, a term they recall– to keep the unhappy many from pacing in their cubicles covered in company platitudes.

Pacing, back-and-fro, like–

The door opens–whether it has been seconds or minutes or hours, it matters little–and the scent of ash and oil fill the room.

It does not suffocate them.

“What’s wrong?”

His grousing is a familiar thing; a strange balm against this unexpected burning in their lungs, and the fever they feel beneath their skin.

Their mind still feels . . . too loose . . . as though the grey matter has become unmoored from their skull.

“I thought I heard something,” they admit, feeling rather foolish all of a sudden. Childish. This anxiety died with their youth. Or so they had thought. The sudden reappearance of it rankles them. “It sounded– well . . . I was not sure if I had heard you.”

Him, or something more sinister. An unwelcome omen.

“Oh, yeah. That. Just stubbed my toe outside is all.”

He is cavalier in his dismissal, as always. And they, despite themself, cannot help the amused exhale that follows. Laughter, in as much as they will allow themself.

“I see,” they hum, for lack of a better retort. The once-sharp edges of their tongue now feel dull behind their blunted teeth. Their mouth is full of molars, and they think little of their canines.

They look at him, here in this lull between their exchanges. They study him, as one studies an overly complicated and frustrating book.

“So . . . did you call me in here just to stare at me, or is there some point to your slack-jawed gaping that you haven’t gotten to yet?”

They wonder what it is that has made them imprint on him so; were it that he has no need for sleep, and thus can never be caught unaware? Or that he is the only thing in all of creation that Death has no claim over?

Others can be ambushed, they can be torn asunder, and they can be rendered lifeless hulls; Bloodhound has seen each of these things come to pass, before their very eyes. Flesh and bone and steel and wire all the same. All but him.

“Could you hurry it up? Just ‘cause I’m immortal doesn’t mean I’ve got all day.”

Or . . . perhaps it is the way he understands their pain so intimately, strung up with wires like marionettes on strings, as they are. The way he refuses to coddle them with sympathetic tones and pitying looks–handling them like some half-drowned kitten. They know, should they ever again make it out of this bed, he will not diminish their skill and strength simply because their captors had bested them once before.

Whatever the core answer might be, there is something comforting in all of his sharp edges and unyielding metal. A firm support so sorely needed.

“I suppose this means you have not retrieved my things, as I have asked?”

It is all they can think to say, in the wake of all of this Nothing swirling so pervasive around their hollowed skull. A gnawing fixation, grinding at their flattened teeth; their tactical gear has become them. Without their iconic ventilator, helmet, sonar . . . what are they?

Who are they to become?

“Workin’ on it,” he grunts. Annoyed by his lack of progress, perhaps; he has never taken failure well, within the arena or without. “Got called back to . . . handle somethin’. But the kid and I found a lead.”

“Oh?” They feign the open curiosity he wants them to have, if only to shepherd him to his point a little quicker.

Slowly, he crosses the room to return to his proclaimed chair. His chosen vigil. He drops down into it with his usual grace–or, lack thereof–and once again lifts his legs to cross them at the ankles, pillowing his feet against their stomach.

“Yeah,” he drawls, reaching over to pluck at the cords and cables of their monitors. An oversized cat playing with string. “Gotta say, whoever your buddies are, they sure work fast.”

His arm extends further, stretching the joint of his elbow and every knuckle of his fingers. All in order to reach the stack of brochures on their bedside table. Just to knock them carelessly onto the floor for someone else to clean.

An oversized, annoying cat.

They will not take his baiting. He waits for their hackled snarling; they are no friends of mine, he wants them to say– to rabidly defend with tooth and claw all degree of separation between them and their attackers. But they will not delight him with such a thing. The quiet staring that they level him with is a wolfish thing in nature.

“Is there, perhaps, some point in your ranting that you have not gotten to? What did you find, djöfullvel . . . speak plainly, and quickly.”

His shoulder plates flex apart, and the ball joints of his shoulders begin to extend. Now whose hackles have been raised, they wonder, amused. He never takes kindly to having his own words parroted to him, they have noticed.

His reaction is . . . less rewarding than they would have expected– or had hoped.

Perhaps this is why he so consistently goads and antagonizes everyone he speaks to; perpetually chasing after a satisfactory high that can never be achieved.

What a sad addiction to feed an already sad existence.

“We found a warehouse full of skinsuits. Not one of them had your shit, but they had com chains . . . they’re working in groups. Bouncing cargo between safehouses, always staying on the move. They got orders from someone to complete ‘the assignment,’ but couldn’t tell you what that is . . . whole message is encrypted, and I ain’t the decrypting type of mech. You’ll have to get some other sap to help you with it.”

He wraps an elongated finger around the cord of their bedside phone, and with the barest twitch he sends the entire device clattering to the floor– receiver and all. “That plain enough for you?”

He says it in the equivalent of one breath – one ventilator pulse. His tone is level, as always; crooning and sardonic. But they read between the velveted lines into the language of his body itself. His irritation speaks to them not in tone or vocabulary, but in the tectonic shifting of his chassis.

The cracking of knuckles and grinding of teeth, they have seen it in other people. In humans.

Human . . . that is what he was, once.

Is still?

Revenant can no longer grind his teeth, as it were. But is this what gatekeeps humanity from him?

Is Octavio any less human for losing his ability to twist an ankle that he no longer has?

They do not have answers to such questions. Perhaps no one does.

“It is sufficient,” they answer to him, instead.

He rises from his preferred perch, “Now if you don’t mind, I got a job to finish.” He stops, one step from the door, barely sparing them a cursory glance over his shoulder, “By the way . . . Fitzroy brought you something. Giving a book to a bookworm . . . groundbreaking.”

Their eyes drift, to the tempo of their hospital room’s door sliding shut, down to the firm weight at the foot of the bed that they failed to register until that moment. Their heel beneath the blankets knocks against the haphazardly wrapped gift, and the shadow of a smile pulls at the corner of their still-healing lips.

A box, they would have assumed at first, but now know otherwise.

It is no disappointment to have this surprise stolen from them. No amount of his bitterness and discontempt for life and all those living within it could rob Bloodhound of the simple joy of peeling back paper and layers of too much tape, all composed by the thoughtful hands of a loving friend.

On the cover, a simple illustration of a white mouse. Within, a simple hand-written note:

‘Been on the hunt for this beauty since you told me how your old copy got lost. Sorry it took so long.

Gave it a read myself before I wrapped it up . . . gotta say, mate, not much of a happy experience. Can’t say I understand the appeal much, but maybe you’ll get this old dog to understand, next time we have one of our little talks.

Hope this makes up for being stuck in a room for so long. Suppose this fella knows how you feel.
Cheers, Fusey’

Does it rain, here, so high above the clouds?

No . . . but their vision swims, all the same.